Abstract

Our aim in this contribution is to focus attention on the lexical model of Constantí Llombart, one of the main representatives of the Renaixença (19thC. Catalan Renaissance) in Valencia. Llombart wanted to extend this movement of cultural recovery to the whole of Valencian society. And that is why he proposed for literary language a linguistic model of synthesis, avoiding the vulgar forms and the Spanish forms of the colloquial language, but also the archaisms that could distance it from the popular sectors. In the lexical purity of the literary language, Llombart took into account the classical writers and the Catalan writers of the Renaixença, as well as the lexicographic sources, especially the dictionaries of Carles Ros and Josep Escrig, and surely also that of Labèrnia. Without renouncing the popular and dialectal lexicon,  he proposed the literary recovery of traditional words, which were unused or decadent, and that experienced the competence of Spanish forms, and he incorporated neologisms and words introduced in the literary Catalan language during the 19th century. 

Abstract

In this paper, we advocate overcoming the dichotomies that fragment the study of language facts (synchrony vs. diachrony, linguistics vs. sociolinguistics, internal history vs. external history), in favor of an approach that integrates the maximum number of possible explanatory factors. A suitable field for this confluence is the analysis of ongoing language changes, which are those that take place in real time in front of the eyes of the researcher, who can thus benefit from the proximity to the object of study and from the accessibility to the multiple factors that condition its evolution, provided that he is capable of not getting overly involved. The analysis of the transformations observed in Northwestern Catalan since the resumption of the standardization process in Catalonia shows how we can increase the degree of understanding of linguistic changes if we are attentive to the interactions that occur between the socially established uses, the forms subjected to the constraints of the system, and the perceptions that end up forming the linguistic awareness of speakers understood as individuals and as a social body.