Zum diachronen Wandel der phorischen Markierung beim katalanischen Relativum

Abstract

The grammatical area of ​​the relatives has a rather large variety of forms and possibilities of expression. Pronouns inherited from Latin can summarize the morphological and grammatical categories of the antecedent noun, they have the function of a resumptive. They allow the variation of the phoric configurations between the antecedent and the relative pronoun. However, in Catalan, there has been a remarkable change in the forms of expression from the 12^th/13^th centuries to the present day.

Historically, as can be seen in the comparison with Latin, there has been a permanent reduction and corruption of the phoric marks (j-marking) to the neutral marking of subject and direct complement in que. With this, the function of the resumptive is eliminated. Nowadays, the situation of Catalan is comparable to that of Spanish and Portuguese. What marks the Catalan changes in the area of ​​the relative, is the fact that the loss of the resumptive is accompanied by strategies of functional deviation that are highly interesting from the linguistic point of view.

As a typological consequence of the loss of the resumptive, today's Catalan prefers contact positions for the simple relatives. The uses in distance require the use of complex relatives: el qual, la qual, etc, which are considered heavy, inelegant and complicated.