THE THIRD WAY: Prepositional Adverbials in the Diachrony of Romance (Part One)

Abstract

This paper analyzes the role of adverbials including a preposition and an adjective (PA pattern) in the diachrony of Romance, from Latin to present-day varieties. In view of present-day standardized Romance languages, PA -patterns (e. g., Sp. de seguro) appear to be lexicalized »adverbial locutions«. Empirical data show, however, that they are (i) productive and (ii) systematically used as alternatives to adverbial adjectives (e. g., Sp. viene seguro’s/he comes sure‘) and adverbs ending in-mente (e. g., Sp. viene seguramente’s/he surely comes‘), until the 17th century. Consequently, PA -patterns are likely to have systematically appeared as a third way of forming adverbials in terms of mainstream analyticity in the Latin-Romance transition. Regarding functional differentiation, PA -patterns display affinity to circumstantial modification, which secondarily favors the development of discourse functions. Two case studies provide a fine-graded diachronic analysis that checks seven claims formulated in the Introduction. The first case concerns Sp. fijo, a learned word borrowed from Classical Latin which undergoes colloquialization (> de fijo, a la fija, por fijo, etc .). The second deals with Fr . vrai, which belongs to the genuine oral tradition. The paper confirms the systematic role of the PA -pattern in the diachrony of Romance.