Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan formula i “família tota” ‘and the whole family’ in death announcements

Abstract

Today the Catalan expression i família tota ‘and the whole family’ is perceived as a common formula for closing the typical enumerations of family members in death announcements. However, if we go back a century, this function was done by i demés família ‘and the rest of family’ (or i demés parents ‘and other relatives’), as a result of an interference that gave to this indefinite the value of the Spanish cognate, to the detriment of its genuine meaning. Fabra, in his task of purifying the language, found a substitute solution in Old Catalan. In this paper, we begin by retracing in Fabra’s texts the various stages through which the proposal passed: from i els parents tots ‘and all the relatives’ to i família tota, through the intermediate step i parents tots ‘and all the relatives’ (in coexistence with i tots altres parents ‘and all other relatives’). Then, by means of the Computerized Corpus of Old Catalan, we establish the medieval foundations of the construction with postnominal tot and we analyze which contexts could legitimize the omission of the specifier. Finally, with the help of the Computerized Textual Corpus of the Catalan Language, we show the progress in the implementation of Fabra's proposal since the publication of his Catalan grammar in 1918, and we confirm that it is yet another success of the normativization process.