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Part of
Diachronic Treebanks for Historical Linguistics
Edited by Hanne Martine Eckhoff, Silvia Luraghi and Marco Passarotti
[Benjamins Current Topics 113] 2020
► pp. 129–148

Spoken Latin behind written texts

Formulaicity and salience in medieval documentary texts

| University of Oslo

This study uses treebanking to investigate how spoken language infiltrated legal Latin in early medieval Italy. The documents used are always formulaic, but they also always contain a ‘free’ part where the case in question is described in free prose. This paper uses this difference to measure how ten linguistic features, representative of the evolution that took place between Classical and Late Latin, are distributed between the formulaic and free parts. Some variants are attested equally often in both parts of the documents, while perceptually or conceptually salient variants appear to be preserved in their conservative form mainly in the formulaic parts.

Keywords: treebank, salience, documentary Latin, legal Latin, Early Middle Ages, scribe, diplomatics, formulaicity, language acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and objectives
  • 2.Data
  • 3.Formulaicity
  • 4.Theoretical background and research setting
  • 5.Linguistic features
  • 6.Results and their interpretation
    • 6.1Formulaicity and salience
    • 6.2Analysis of the morphological and syntactic features
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 28 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.113.05kor
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