Some remarks about alleged semantic specificities in the fala of Cáceres

Abstract

In the northwest of Cáceres there is a Romance variety with controverted affiliation. The recent book of Costas (2013) gathers several works that defend a Galician origin, explained by medieval processes of repopulation. One section contains a selection of words that have acquired a meaning in that variety; this list could be used as an evidence of the special character of this language with respect to its neighbours and to point out its distance from Portuguese. Nevertheless, this paper proposes a contrastive analysis between those words and Castilian and Portuguese dialectal materials that reveals that the situation is far from Costas’ description. In fact, almost half of the meanings that were presented as specificities of the fala are well documented in dialectal Portuguese. This paper aims to claim the need to consider dialectal materials produced close to the Valley of the Ellas, since they are essential to reach rigorous conclusions about the origin of the fala.

Keywords

• Fala
• portugués
• galego
• Cáceres
• léxico dialectal
• innovación semántica