The Third Way: Prepositional Adverbials from Latin to Romance

The project The third way: Prepositional adverbials from Latin to Romance directed by Martin Hummel at the University of Graz studies patterns such as French à la dure to do something the hard way and Spanish de seguro surely, certainly in Romance (French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Spanish). The main hypothesis of the project claims that the pattern was a highly productive third way to realize adverbial functions in the transition from Latin to Romance. This aspect has been neglected or completely overlooked in manuals, grammars and linguistic studies. The project thus sheds a new light on important theoretical and empirical aspects of Romance diachrony. In particular, the project aims to analyze the interface of oral and written traditions. In fact, the third way splits into two paths: the path followed by spoken patterns (e.g. à la dure), and another path pertaining to the written tradition (e.g. Sp. de subito, de ordinario). The Latin-Romance transition will be tackled using three methods: the diachrony according to the available texts, the reconstruction of the spoken tradition on the basis of Medieval Romance and present-day non-standard varieties, and the analysis of translations from Latin to Romance. In order to supervise the research in the vast domain of Romance, three international partners from England, Romania and Spain support the project as co-supervisors. The project will also provide new data for the already existing open access data base (https://adjective-adverb.uni-graz.at) and benefit from synergies with the FWF-ORD project granted to the research-group in March 2017.

The project directed by Martin Hummel at the University of Graz studies so-called PA-patterns (PA = Preposition + Adjective) such as Fr. à la dure 'to do something the hard way' and Spanish de seguro 'surely, certainly' in Romance (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish). According to the main hypothesis of the project, the pattern was a highly productive "third way", alongside short adverbs (Sp. trabajar duro 'to work hard') and adverbs ending in -mente (Sp. trabajar duramente), to realize adverbial functions in the "analyticising" transition from Latin to Romance. This aspect had been neglected or completely overlooked in manuals, grammars and linguistic studies. In particular, the project aims to analyse the interface of oral and written traditions. In fact, the third way splits into two paths: one path follows spoken patterns (e.g., Fr. à la dure), a second path pertains to the written tradition (e.g., Sp. de sbito, de ordinario). The Latin-Romance transition was tackled using two methods: (i) the diachrony according to the available texts (ii) the reconstruction of the spoken tradition from present-day non-standard varieties investigated by field research in six dialect areas: Brazil (Bahia), Canada (Quebec), Italy (Campanian variety), Mexico (Xalapa, Aguascalientes), Romania (Banat), Spain (Andalusia), leading to four major results: Common assumptions of PA-adverbials being rarely used in Latin could be refuted. There is instead continuity from Classical Latin, but this holds only for the educated written tradition, that is, forms such as Sp. de/por cierto. By contrast, the folk tradition of using manyfold PA-adverbials such as Fr. à la légère drives back to spoken Latin only. Hence, there is an orality-literacy split in diachrony. The diachronic tendency of PA-patterns to end up as lexicalised adverbial locutions in modern language is not only indebted to language normalization, as initially claimed. It is also due to the pattern-inherent inclusion of pragmatic-situational features, and this since Classical Latin (e.g., Fr. à la légère adds the speaker's attitude to manner modification: 'executed without caring about the consequences'). Field research has brought to light a striking difference between secondary dialects (such as the two Mexican points of investigation) and primary dialects (such as the Italian one). The former tend to high individual variation and undergo the uniformizing influence of roofing Mexican standard, the latter clearly displays low individual variation and differs from standard Italian, that is, the dialect builds a coherent unit known by everybody. The use of combined prepositions such as Rom. de-adevr and MexSp. de a gratis, de a de veras, is characteristic for "lateral" (Bartoli 1925) areas of Romance. Complex prepositions originate in spoken Latin, e.g., Lat. de ex ante > Sp. desde, and subsequently affect also PA-adverbials.