«Que ja·s parla different que·sparlava deu anys ha esta part». Modern Catalan: The indispensable link in the chain of linguistic history of Catalan

Abstract

In this paper we review the causes that have led to the long-established underestimation of Catalan texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the first third of the nineteenth, which is why the linguistic study of Modern Catalan has received less attention than the study of Catalan language from other periods. Despite this situation, we point out some linguistic innovations of Modern Catalan that make its study very attractive and, at the same time, very necessary to achieve a complete knowledge of the evolutionary phases of Catalan from its origin to our days and, especially, to understand the linguistic changes that turned Old Catalan into a modern language very close to the one used today. Finally, because of the next culmination of the Computerized Corpus of Modern Catalan, that will allow researchers to introduce corpus linguistics into the study of Catalan from 1601 to 1833, we refer to the advantages that corpus linguistics, combined with the philological method, brings to diachronic linguistics.