Comparative reconstruction in Romance syntax
1968; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/03740463.1968.10411463
ISSN1949-0763
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistics and language evolution
ResumoAbstract Although not always openly acknowledging that they do so, scholars in Romance linguistics have, ever since Diez' time, practised comparative reconstruction in phonology and morphology. 1 Cf. the discussion in my “The Reconstruction of Proto-Romance”, Language XXVI (1950), pp. 6-27, and “On Realism in Reconstruction”, ibid. XXXVI (1960), pp. 203-206. The most recent example of failure to recognize the basis on which historical Romance linguistics operates is in the egregious remarks of M. A. Pei in Romanic Review LVI (1965), pp. 60-62. In other fields, the validity and usefulness of reconstructive procedures has long been recognized. In mathematics, the classic example is the reconstruction of the lost books of Apollonius of Perga on conic sections, made by Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703) and published in his De maximis et minimis geometrica derivatio in quintum Conicorum Apollonii Pergaei adhuc desideratum (1659), verified soon thereafter by the publication in 1661 of the original, known through an Arabic translation. Cf. the remarks of Et[tore] B[ortolotti] in the Enciclopedia Italiana XXXV, p. 529: “... si potè constatare la sostanziale corrispondenza con quella che il V., con mirabile intuito geometrico, aveva ricostruito, conservando, anche nella forma espositiva e nell'ordinamento logico della materia, il rigore classico”. Thus, one reconstructs, for example, a nine-vowel system for Proto-Romance, or a set of verbal forms, e.g. in the present tense for ‘to wish’, . Neither in Romance nor in other fields has this type of reconstruction been practised on the syntactic level, especially in the last hundred or so years. In the earlier years of Indo-European comparative reconstruction, scholars were not so timid, and it is well known that August Schleicher reconstructed an entire fable in his version of Proto-Indo-European. 2 Cf. H. Pedersen, Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), pp.268-269. Unfortunately, soon after Schleicher's time, it became evident that his reconstruction of I-E phonology was not satisfactory; from this, it was concluded, rather illogically, that the reconstruction of texts must be an inadmissible procedure. So strong has prejudice been against the reconstruction of utterances longer than a single word, that W. Ph. Lehmann, in setting up the I-E sentence ‘the cow comes’, was very apologetic about doing so. 3 Language XXXIV (1958), p. 188.
Referência(s)