Per què els elements gal.loromànics fan 'heavy' en català. Arran del clàssic debat sobre la subagrupació del català
(2012)Abstract
In Romance philology there have been two important debates about Catalan: the first one asked, whether Catalan was a language independent of Occitan; the second one was about the affiliation of Catalan with either the Iberoromance or the Galloromance branch. Both debates have been considered closed: the first one with Meyer-Lübkes 1925 study Das Katalanische, firmly establishing Catalan as an independent Romance language, and the second one in the late seventies with a compromise formula coined by Antoni Badia i Margarit, according to which Catalan was a “bridge language”. In this contribution it is argued, that the old debate should be reconsidered for three reasons: Firstly, because the original arguments failed to take into account that Catalan has been converging with Iberoromance during the last 1000 (and more pronouncedly during the last 500) years. Secondly, because the original debate did not take into account syntactic information. And thirdly, because a keener differentiation between the Gallo- and Iberoromance elements can shed new light on an ongoing internal debate about ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ Catalan. Catalan is presented as an inherently Galloromance language which during the last 500 years has been heavily converging with Iberoromance. academia.edu