Word order variation: register and genre

Do you write a WhatsApp message to your mate Seán to arrange going to the pub quizz tonight the same way you write a cover letter for your dream job? Probably (and hopefully!) not. Written language, just like spoken language, is governed by different conventions that define which linguistic structures and formulae are expected in different contexts. We can distinguish different types of register (whether a text is considered more or less formal, or closer or further from oral language), as well as different types of textual genre ( bundles of formal conventions we expect to occur in a specific text, for instance, letters are expected to be headed by the place and date, followed by a greeting that will reflect the degree of familiarity between the sender and the intended recipient). Recent research has been consistently showing that the same held for the medieval Romance languages. For most many of them, including Catalan, we have enough written data to compare texts belonging to different genres and instantiating different registers.

In fact, one of the problems that we (researchers investigating old languages) often encounter is that since our main (and only) source of data are written texts, it is difficult to establish to what extent they are representative of the spoken language of a period since written texts abided by rigid stylistic and formal conventions. An example on how written texts can mislead us about the features of spoken language could be the use of the future subjunctive in Modern Peninsular Spanish. This verb tense encodes that something could maybe happen in the future and is no longer used in oral speech. However, it is rather common in legal texts, which are highly formulaic, generally archaising and abide by strict stylistic and formal conventions. The future subjunctive is used to cover all possible scenarios derived from a certain situation: "If x were ever to happen in the future, then y". If in 700 years someone stumbles upon a compilation of Modern Peninsular Spanish legal texts and they attempt to reconstruct spoken Peninsular Spanish from them, they could assume that the Modern Peninsular Spanish future subjunctive is alive and kicking. Nevertheless, if they take into account the genre and register of their source of information, and, ideally, are able to compare their data with data from other textual sources belonging to other genres (like a compilation of WhatsApp messages between two mates), they will be able to establish that the future subjunctive is a defining feature of the legal genre and formal (and distant) registers, and that less formal registers are governed by other conventions. The same applies to Medieval texts, as I showed in Pujol i Campeny 2020a.

My objective is to compare Old Catalan texts belonging to different genres and establish which features can be considered to be at the core of the language, which ones reflect the conventional pressures of registers and genres, and which reflect something that can be taken to reflect spoken language. In addition, being able to establish which textual genres display archaising features within contemporary texts allows for the identification of different stages of the language, helping us understand how it changed.

I am also interested in the investigation of reported speech and what it can tell us about spoken language in the past. Reported speech has often been labeled as a reliable source of 'oral' data. However, this may not always be the case. Once more, register and genre of the text containing the reported speech will determine whether we can take it to be a reliable source of spoken-like data. For instance, 13th century legal texts can provide us with more reliable reported speech than historical chronicles. This is the case because the former try to (more or less) faithfully reproduce the speech of different participants in court, and the latter try to portray certain events as heroic, and may tend to rely on epic-sounding structures, often archaising. I gave a talk on this at SLE 2020, which I am happy to share.