Research Project "Deutsche Wortfeldetymology im Europäischen Kontext"

This article presents recent scholarship about origin and function of grammatical gender. Gender is considered to be either opaque or to serve for reference tracking, in facilitating the access to the mental lexicon or in structuring it semantically with regard to nominal aspect. This latter proposition is here discussed taking into consideration hypotheses about the emergence and development of gender in PIE and the function of the suffix *-(a)h2. Evidence from the Germanic, Romance and Brittonic languages illustrates the long-term developments that occurred in connection with the restructuring of gender systems in which the continuation or the revival of gender semantics for parts
of the lexicon may be observed.

The article examines the fate of Indo European suffixes for the formation of action nouns from a diachronic point of view. As suffixes may become unproductive for an number of reasons, while the need of a means for their formation persists. The
survey of several Indo-European languages (i.e. Old Irish, Germanic, Romance and Baltic languages) shows that two divergent tendencies are at work to fill the gap: On the one hand new suffixes are created by the combination of suffixes/morphemes.
Such suffixes explicitely mark an action noun as belonging to the secondary (derived) lexicon. On the other hand action nouns are created by back formation and thus resemble words of the primary (underived) lexicon. Languages differ with regard to their use of different suffixes for the expression of different semantics.

The article discusses the gender of suffixes deriving abstract nouns of the Brittonic languages Welsh, Breton and Cornish against the theoretical background of functional gender theories. These theories assume that gender plays a role in the classification of the nominal lexicon, i.e. it classifies nouns according to the feature [±particularized] thus expressing nominal aspect. The effects of this classification may be observed in abstract nouns in Modern High German, but the feature is assumed to be ultimatively inherited from Proto-Indo-European.
Although all Brittonic languages display remarkable similarities with regard to their nominal morphology, the gender of suffixes and the restructuring which each language experienced varies considerably between them. The association of feminine (and neuter) gender with abstractness was probably already lost in Proto-Brittonic. Abstract nouns are predominantly masculine in Welsh and Cornish, while the higher proportion of feminine patterns in Breton is largely due to French influence. Further, Breton points to the emergence of a functional gender system within some parts of the lexicon.

Intensifiers and reflexives have been studied as features both in areal linguistics and in the context of substratum hypotheses. While typical SAE languages differentiate between intensifiers and reflexives, English, Welsh and Irish
use complex intensifiers for both functions. This article discusses the two strategies with regard to their diachronic developments, starting with PIE. Complex intensifiers
are first recorded in Old British and emerge only later in English and Irish. These complex intensifiers are then increasingly used as reflexives, constituting an instance of areal divergence from SAE between the late Middle Ages
and the early modern period. Breton, on the other hand, maintains its intensifier – reflexive differentiation due to areal convergence.

The concept of Standard Average European Sprachbund is one of the most influential and widely known within the field of areal linguistics. According to its advocates, the standard written varieties of the major European languages have become increasingly similar through a series of convergent developments, which took place during the great migrations and the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The languages located at the Western fringe of Europe, i.e. Insular Celtic languages and Basque, display but very few SAE-features and appear to have taken little or no part in this convergence process.
The present article will examine the Insular Celtic and Basque features to demonstrate that these languages show more convergent developments than is admitted by the SAE- hypothesis. In addition, the diachronic dimension of the SAE will be discussed by dating the emergence of the features within the individual languages. The results of this analysis seriously question both the socio-historic scenario and the time-frame proposed for these developments.

This article researches the functions and diachronic developments of the preverbal marker ym- in the Middle Welsh Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi. It can be shown that MW ym-, which is commonly described as a marker of reciprocity and reflexivity, actually displays various context-dependent detransitivising functions. Reflexive ym-verbs include not only full reflexives, but the whole range of middle situation types as established by Kemmer 1993. On the discourse-pragmatic level, the ym-VERB a(c)-construction as discontinuous reciprocal construction demotes untopical participants of reciprocal events. In certain contexts, this construction can be identified as an antipassive, demoting the object of the corresponding transitive verb and shifting topicality to the agent.
The functions of MW ym- are thus comparable to those of the so-called reflexive markers based on PIE *s(u̯)e in other European languages. The article proposes a model explaining how MW ym-, which etymologically originates from the Proto-Celtic preposition *ambi- ‛about, on all sides’, expanded its scope and and developed into a marker of detransitivity.

The use of the sewing needle in Western Europe dates back to the Late Upper Palaeolithic. The terms denoting this instrument in the older PIE languages are highly divergent. The present article discusses their etymologies and the conclusions to be drawn from the combination of linguistic and archaeological data.

In Modern Welsh, the intensifier X hun(an) is also used as a reflexive pronoun. However, this functional expansion is recent and becomes productive only after the Middle Welsh period. The present quantitative study based on the corpora Rhyddiaith y 13eg Ganrif and Rhyddiaith Gymraeg / Welsh Prose 1300-1425 reveals that in Middle Welsh X hun(an) is used almost exclusively as an intensifier, while reflexivity is coded by the verbal prefix ym-or by plain pronouns. Verbs coded with either strategy have very similar semantics, denoting positive or negative self-directed actions. It is however difficult to find a feature that connects the fourteen, partly controversial instances of reflexive X hun(an) contained in the corpora. 1 INTRODUCTION The different types of reflexive markers are a much discussed areal feature of the languages of Western Europe. * While the markers of most European languages, like e.g. German sich, French se or Italian si are based on the PIE reflexive pronoun *s(w)e 1 , English and the neighbouring Insular Celtic languages Welsh and Irish 2 employ different markers originating from intensifers. As a result, reflexive markers and intensifiers are different in the former group, but not in the latter. German expresses reflexivity with the pronouns mich, dich, sich, etc. (ex. 1a, 1b), while uninflected selbst 'self' is used as an intensifer (ex. 1c adnominal, 1c adverbal), English uses my-, your-, himself, etc. in both cases. (1) (a) German Ich sehe mich im Spiegel. reflexive English I see myself in the mirror. (b) German Er spricht ständig mit sich. reflexive English He keeps talking to himself. (c) German Der Präsident selbst wird der Feier beiwohnen. intensifier English The President himself will attend the ceremony. (d) German Der Präsident schrieb seine Rede selbst. intensifier English The President wrote his speech himself. A formal similarity of intensifiers / reflexives is to be observed especially between English and Welsh. Both languages have complex markers consisting of a pronoun inflected according to person, number and gender coupled with a second element, which is self in English, hun in North Welsh and hunan in South Welsh (table 1). In addition, both markers originate from intensifiers and are in use with such function.