Written from the twin perspectives of linguistic and cultural change, this pioneering book describes the language inherited from Latin and how it was then influenced by the Visigothic and Arabic invasions and later by contact with Old French, Old Provençal, English and, not least, with the indigenous languages of South and Central America.

This book is a general introduction to the structures of the different medieval Romance vernaculars most commonly known as Old or Medieval Spanish, as preserved in texts from Spain from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. After discussing general methodological questions concerning the description and analysis of an earlier historical stage of a modern language, the individual chapters in the first part of the book describe the orthography, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of medieval Hispano-Romance. Steven N. Dworkin offers the first systematic description of the language in English, and compares its structures with those found in the modern variety. In the second part of the book, the features of medieval Hispano-Romance are exemplified in an anthology of selected texts, one from each of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, accompanied by linguistic commentary. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of Romance linguistics, Spanish historical linguistics, and Spanish medieval literary and cultural studies.

"Spanish medieval language and literature newsletter." (varies).

The Evolution of Spanish Past Forms examines how Spanish past forms have changed diachronically. With examples from Medieval Spanish, Golden Age Spanish, and Modern Spanish literary works, this book demonstrates how language is dynamic and susceptible to change. The past forms considered here include the preterit, the imperfect, the imperfect progressive with estar (temporal to be), the present perfect, the imperfect progressive with other auxiliary verbs, the preterit progressive with estar, and the preterit progressive with other auxiliary verbs. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students investigating tense and aspect phenomena in Spanish and other languages, grammaticalization processes, and language variation and change.