Two Studies in Old Spanish Homonymics

Abstract

UO arly attention. Although the role played by homonymy in lexical loss was recognized by such pioneering Romanists as Friedrich Diez, Carolina Michailis, and Arsene Darmesteter, it was the work of Jules Gilli6ron in the first three decades of this century that led to the heightened attention paid to this phenomenon. Many of Gillieron's contemporaries recognized that he and some of his followers tended to exaggerate the impact of homonymy, a condition which usually threatened communication only if the affected items were of the same part of speech, displayed (nearly) identical syntactic behavior and were semantically related (e.g. Gillieron's now classic example of the formal convergence as gat of the Gascon reflexes of GALLUS 'cock' and GATTUS 'cat').2 Not unexpectedly, most work in the Romance domain on homonymy has dealt with French, in whose history the impact of syncope and apocope has led to the convergent phonetic evolution of numerous genetically distinct lexical items. In contrast, very little systematic work has been done regarding the effects of homonymy in the history of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.

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