30.2104, Review: Spanish; Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Phonology; Syntax: Dworkin (2018)

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Subject: 30.2104, Review: Spanish; Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Phonology; Syntax: Dworkin (2018)

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Date: Fri, 17 May 2019 17:42:57
From: John Ryan [john.ryan at unco.edu]
Subject: A Guide to Old Spanish

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-4851.html

AUTHOR: Steven N. Dworkin
TITLE: A Guide to Old Spanish
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: John M. Ryan, University of Northern Colorado

SUMMARY

A Guide to Old Spanish is an introductory grammar of the language variety
commonly referred to as Old or Medieval Spanish, and as Dworkin terms it,
Medieval Hispano-Romance. The book is divided into two parts. The first, which
is titled “Linguistic features of Medieval Hispano-Romance,” consists of 5
chapters that focus on the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical
structures that characterize the diasystem of vernaculars that form this
historical variety of Romance. The second part of the book is a brief
anthology that consists of excerpts from three Castilian texts of the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, respectively, and whose
purpose is to illustrate many of the points made throughout the first section
of the book.

Part I begins with an introductory Chapter 1 on the nature of “Old Spanish,”
and seeks to define terms, establish parameters and limitations, and provide a
backdrop of previous work on the topic. The chapter begins with the more
general discussion of language naming and segues into the differing varieties
of Hispano-Romance. It then poses the question of the Latin/Romance dichotomy
with a discussion of Wright’s theory of the effects of the Carolingian Reform
on Latin pronunciation. The penultimate section of the chapter delves into the
characteristics of the earliest Hispano-Romance texts. Chapter 1 then
concludes this introductory overview with a section on traces of spoken
medieval Hispano-Romance.  

Chapter 2 is the first installment of what will be the topic of the remainder
of the book’s first part, namely the description of medieval Hispano-Romance
linguistic structure. The focus of this chapter is phonetics, phonology, and
orthography. It begins with a brief summary of some fifteenth-century sources
which help inform medieval Spanish pronunciation. It also mentions the modern
Judeo-Spanish varieties that retain earlier consonants. The chapter then leads
to a discussion of vowels, stress patterns, and consonants, including
dedicated sections on “yeísmo” and the aspiration of syllable- and word-final
-s. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the non-standardized nature of
medieval Spanish orthography.

Chapter 3 continues the discussion of Hispano-Romance linguistic features with
the topic of inflectional morphology. With a brief description of the
chapter’s scope, Dworkin reminds us that the polymorphism that can be found to
exist within the same text should not be construed to mean that such
instability existed within an individual speaker. He then takes the discussion
to the topic of grammatical gender and gender marking, determiners and
pronouns, followed by brief sections on morphological adverbs and numerals.
The remainder of the chapter is devoted to assorted topics in verbal
morphology, focusing on conjugation classes, past participles, gerunds, verb
stems and endings, and the final sections of the chapter addressing the
synthetic pluperfect, future stems and endings, the compound tenses, and
subjunctive verbal morphology.

Chapter 4 addresses the topic of syntax and specifies that its purpose is not
to provide a detailed description of syntactic phenomena, but rather focuses
on select features of the noun phrase, verb phrase and sentential syntax.
Beginning with the noun phrase, Dworkin pursues the discussion of medieval use
of the definite and indefinite articles, the neuter pronoun “lo”,
demonstratives and possessives, and partitive constructions. He then
transitions into the topic of SVO versus VSO word order, placement of nominal
direct objects, and pre- versus post nominal placement of adjectives. Dworkin
then concludes this section with a discussion of direct object marking and the
placement of object pronouns, and pronominal duplication. Moving on to the
verb phrase, Dworkin begins with the simple tenses, the synthetic versus
analytic futures, and the compound past tenses with related subtopics of
differential auxiliary selection, participle-object agreement, and auxiliary
placement. The chapter then concludes with attention to more notable verbal
constructions which include the “estar” plus gerund construction, the
subjunctive, passive constructions, “tener” versus “(h)aver” and “ser” versus
“estar.”

Chapter 5 marks the end of the first section of the book with a treatment on
the medieval Hispano-Romance lexicon. The chapter begins with an overview of
both specialized and more generalized dictionaries on the subject. Dworkin
indicates that his purpose is to highlight select differences between the
modern standard language and medieval Hispano-Romance. He then discusses the
topic of lexical strata and how early borrowings by such writers as Berceo
were restricted to written registers and did not make it into the spoken
language until much later. Dworkin also discusses the great extent of lexical
stability and retention of core vocabulary in Spanish. He then provides a list
of those nouns, verbs and function words that have fallen into disuse. The
next section of the chapter broaches the topics of previously existing
doublets for which one of the variants fell into disuse and words that have
undergone semantic change. The chapter finishes with a discussion of the
nature of suffixation, prefixation and compounding in the medieval language as
compared with their productivity in the modern language.

Part II, titled “Anthology of Texts” is the shorter of the two sections of
Dworkin’s book. It provides three textual samples of medieval Hispano-Romance:
the first being the “General estoria IV” of Alfonso X el Sabio dating from the
second half of the thirteenth century; the second being “El conde Lucanor” of
Don Juan Manuel from the first half of the fourteenth century; and the last
being “Atalaya de las corónicas” of Alfonso Martínez de Toledo from the
mid-fifteenth century. Dworkin introduces each excerpt with a brief analysis
of the relevant features contained therein.  

EVALUATION

A Guide to Old Spanish is both a fresh and timely arrival among the canon of
books on the topic of early Spanish structure, and as Dworkin points out in
the preface, his text has several advantages over previous works in terms of
accessibility to a wider audience of readers. In that regard, the text is
truly an overview of all levels of linguistic structure in that it is
organized to include individual chapters on the analyses of phonological,
morphological, syntactic and lexical phenomena. Secondly, as Dworkin also
points out, the fact that it is written in English, makes the material readily
available not only to students of Spanish, but to students of other Romance
languages, or other medieval scholars whose focus, though outside of the field
of linguistics, may also benefit from exposure to the points made in the text.
Before the appearance of Dworkin’s book, the closest analysis of this kind
would have been Lloyd (1987), which although it too was in English, lacked
treatment of syntax and the lexicon, and is now, of course, dated.
Furthermore, much like Dworkin’s (2012) seminal book on the Spanish lexicon,
the text of A Guide to Old Spanish is written in a style that is both
approachable and a pleasant read.

Despite its modest length of 152 pages (including references), Dworkin’s book
surveys the most important developments and opinions in the field of Spanish
Romance linguistics, even those that have not received wide acceptance. For
example, in Chapter 1 on the nature of Old Spanish, Dworkin discusses Wright’s
(1982) theory of complex bilingualism in which the latter 
argued for the lack of conceptual distinction among speakers between Latin and
Romance up until the late eleventh century CE. Furthermore, Dworkin’s book is
concise, well documented, and fully cited throughout. Each chapter clearly
states what it will do and what it will not, and in cases where additional and
more exhaustive treatment is available, Dworkin provides full citations to
those sources. Such an example is Dworkin’s Chapter 4 on syntax, and his
provision of Company (2006, 2009, 2014) as citations for further reading on
the topic.

Another aspect of the book’s comprehensiveness is Dworkin’s use of data from
Romance languages other than Castilian, both within and outside the Iberian
Peninsula, to further explain content. An example of this is in Chapter 3 on
the topic of gender marking where Dworkin provides a brief account of the
differential marking of count and mass nouns in central and eastern Asturian.
Later, in his Chapter 4 discussion  of the topic of auxiliary selection for
the compound tenses, Dworkin refers to Italo-Romance, French, and
Provençal/Occitan as being languages that have preserved the use of the dual
HAVE and BE auxiliaries for the perfect tenses. This multilinguistic approach
is important for two reasons; first it underscores the notion that the history
of Spanish did not happen in a vacuum but was rather part of a larger story in
the evolution of Latin into the Romance languages. In second regard, it
provides a point of convergence for scholars whose focus is other languages.
An example of this is in Chapter 5 on the lexicon where Dworkin details
lexemes that are no longer present in modern Spanish, but as this reviewer can
attest, have survived with reflexes in the other modern Romance languages.

An additional strength of the book is the inclusion in Part II of the brief
anthology of representative texts from the period of analysis, namely, between
the tenth and fifteenth centuries CE. Although Dworkin never refers to his
book as a textbook--there are no exercises at the end of each chapter--the
anthology makes the text suitable for use as a springboard for discussion with
both advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

In overall assessment, Dworkin’s categorization of his book as a “guide” as
opposed to a “grammar” is highly accurate, not in terms of what it does not
cover, but in the sense that it accomplishes more than what one would expect
from a grammar. In fact, Dworkin’s use of the term is quite fortuitous in that
it reflects the notion of a Spanish “guion” in its true augmentative sense as
a ‘large or comprehensive guide’ rather than its more common usage as a
‘script’ or ‘outline.’ Both its accessibility and the comprehensive nature of
its content make it an appealing read for a wide audience of undergraduate and
graduate students, as well as scholars both within and outside of
Hispanofilia.

REFERENCES

Company Company, Concepción (Ed.). (2006). Sintaxis histórica de la lengua
española. Primera parte: la frase verbal. Volúmenes 1 & 2. Lengua y Estudios
Literarios Series. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Company Company, Concepción (Ed.). (2009). Sintaxis histórica de la lengua
española. Segunda parte: la frase nominal. Volúmenes 1 & 2. Lengua y Estudios
Literarios Series. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Company Company, Concepción (Ed.). (2014). Sintaxis histórica de la lengua
española. Tercera parte. Adverbios, preposiciones y conjunciones. Relaciones
interoracionales. Volúmenes 1, 2 & 3. Lengua y Estudios Literarios Series.
Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Dworkin, Steven. (2012). A History of the Spanish Lexicon: A Linguistic
Perspective. Oxford University Press. 

Lloyd, Paul.  (1987). From Latin to Spanish: Vol. 1: Historical Phonology and
Morphology of the Spanish Language. Memoirs Series, American Philosophical
Society.

Wright, Roger. 1982. Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian
France. Liverpool: Francis Cairns.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

John M. Ryan is Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University
of Northern Colorado. His work on first and second language acquisition
includes articles published in JCLAD, Hispania, JLTR and TPLS. Also, recent
work in historical linguistics and discourse analysis has appeared in several
edited volumes. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the early
transitional structures of Proto Ibero Romance.





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