Abstract
Los objetivos principales de este trabajo son, por una parte, plantear una propuesta metodológica para el estudio del cambio lingüístico en árabe clásico y, por otra, explorar las particularidades de los procesos de gramaticalización y el cambio lingüístico en esta lengua semítica. Para ello, hemos analizado los procesos de cambio y gramaticalización experimentados por la partícula ḥattā (‘hasta’, ‘incluso’) en árabe clásico desde el siglo VII hasta el XX. Se han analizado 731 ejemplos de ḥattā extraídos de uno de los más completos corpus históricos del árabe, el HADC, todavía inédito. El estudio ha tenido en cuenta 30 variables diferentes que se han recogido en fichas recopiladas en una base de datos relacional. Los resultados se han organizado en un esquema conceptual que presenta la vinculación semántica de cada uno de los cinco valores de ḥattā así como las trayectorias evolutivas de esta partícula en árabe clásico. Las conclusiones más relevantes son que, por descontado, sí hay cambio lingüístico en árabe clásico, si bien sus trayectorias evolutivas se ven constreñidas tanto por la presión de la norma coránica como por su naturaleza de lengua esencialmente escrita. Los resultados también revelan que existe una marcada estratificación, persistencia y divergencia en los procesos y apuntan, a su vez, la relevancia de incluir variables como el origen del autor o los tipos de texto cuando se analiza el cambio lingüístico.
Highlights
The Arabic language has an extensive and exceptionally rich literary and grammatical tradition; it has not, been the subject of much diachronic research
This study has two main objectives. It attempts to provide a rigorous methodology for the study of language change in Classical Arabic[1]; on the other hand, it aims to explore the specificities of grammaticalization processes and language change in fuṣḥā through the case of the particle ḥattā
The third principle we want to highlight is divergence: “when a lexical form undergoes grammaticalization to a clitic or affix, the original form may remain as an autonomous lexical element and undergo the same changes as ordinary lexical items”[59]. This concept refers, to the notional and functional split that sometimes happens in processes of language change, when from a unique lexical item can be formed two elements, one with a grammatical value and another that keeps the lexical meaning of the etymon. in ḥattā we find this division between the lexical etymon ḥadd, uninterruptedly used with its original meaning of ‘limit’, ‘border’, on the one hand, and on the other, the grammatical element ḥattā, that experiences grammaticalization and subjectivization processes
Summary
The Arabic language has an extensive and exceptionally rich literary and grammatical tradition; it has not, been the subject of much diachronic research. Classical Arabic is constrained by certain ideological, religious and political beliefs which hold that it is historically fixed and essentially unaffected by language change[2]. This reasoning is due to the sacred nature often attributed to it, which argues that it mainly originated as the language of the Quran, which is simultaneously its greatest expression. Fuṣḥā is a symbol of pan-Arabic unity, and some consider that allowing it to change would threaten this unity These factors, along with the lack of linguistic tools such as corpora, historical grammars and dictionaries, and the absence of a strong research tradition in which to ground it,
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