Published in New Approaches in the Research on the Crown of Aragon

Keywords: Auditory Verbs, Evidenciality, Invited Inferencing, Old Catalan, Perception Verbs, Verb Entendre.

This study analyzes the process of semantic change by which the Old Catalan verb entendre developed from the 13th to the 16th centuries from a meaning based on intellectual perception to one implying auditory perception. In particular, this article shows that by the end of the 14th century the verb entendre had only semanticized the perception of linguistic stimuli and had not fused completely with the meaning of the verb oir, as was the case with the evolution of INTENDERE in other Romance languages (such as French, Occitan, and Sardinian). Our study has been based on data analysis of an electronic linguistic corpus using the concepts of E. C. Traugott's Invited Interfering Theory of Semantic Change (TCSII) (2012) and the concept of evidenciality.