The spatial morpheme 'y' in old Spanish : semantical approach ; Le morphème spatial 'y' en espagnol ancien : approche sémantique

The adverbial pronoun y vanished from Old Spanish at the end of the XVth century. It survived, however, in the signs hay, soy, estoy, doy et voy. The purpose of the present doctoral dissertation is to explain why the pronoun as such disappeared , in the first place, and why, on the other hand, it did survive in the five above-mentioned verbal forms. The present work is comprised of two sections. The first one analyses the stematic morpheme y, a task which implies studying the system of spatial representations. The second one deals with the verbal forms containing this same morpheme in astematic form and this in turn implies a semantic approach of existential verbs. Every language generates its own system of spatial representation, depending on how its users perceive the world. In Spanish, two different systems were available to the medieval speakers: one represented by the anaphoric elements y and ende, the other one represented by the deictic words aquí, acá, ahí, allí, allá, acullá, aquende and allende. These two systems were harbouring two different conceptualizations of space. In the first system, y signifies space as a whole. The second one, on the contrary, splits the space in relation to the EGO as SPEAKER and to the locus of that EGO. The semiology of the five verbal forms delineates a specific set of elements, the signifiers of which are marked by -y and whose general consistency is based on the semantesis of existential verbs. The hypothesis presented in the present work runs contrary to the subduction theory, advocated in particular by Maurice Molho, which explains the coalescence in the first four verbal forms through an analogy with hay. ; Le pronom-adverbe y en espagnol ancien a disparu à la fin du XVe siècle. Il a survécu néanmoins à travers les signes hay, soy, estoy, doy et voy. L’objet de la présente thèse est d’expliquer les raisons de sa disparition, d’une part, et de sa survivance dans ces cinq formes verbales, d’autre part. Elle se divise en deux parties. La première porte sur l’analyse du ...