Infrequent Syntactic Phenomena and Text Editing: The Case of the Second Part of the "General Estoria"

Abstract

This article deals mainly with the treatment received by several less-frequent syntactic structures present in the K manuscript of the Second Part of the General Estoria in the Solalinde, Kasten and Oelschläger edition (1957 and 1961). Even though the editors claim not to have made many changes to the text of K, a detailed analysis shows that often these changes affect less-frequent syntactic structures, some of which can hardly have been considered erroneous. The reason for this editorial policy may have been the lack of distinction between textual and non-textual variants. Following the principle of choosing the best variant (although they have not prepared a critical edition, the editors have not given up the right to change the readings of the manuscript), the editors have also sometimes discarded genuine or possibly genuine linguistic traits of the manuscript.