Syntactic Change

In this paper I investigate the diachronic development of the "fratris me pudet" (Ter. Ad. 391) construction type in Late Latin, with a view to exploring the factors that played a significant role in the analogical process that lead this impersonal pattern to be reinterpreted as personal and transitive over centuries. By comparing the kind of Stimuli typically associated with the pudet-type verbs and their specific meaning, I show that they differ in view of different degrees of agentivity, control and volitionality exerted by the Experiencer. Paenitet ‘to repent’ reveals itself as being the most agentive verb and this is why it underwent an early process of personalization, achieved only later by those verbs whose semantics implied a lower degree of rational involvement and control over the experience. This paper shows that semantic factors may influence the formal coding of a given verb and accelerate its syntactic reinterpretation, and explores in what terms such constructional changes took place in Late Latin.

Recent work in grammaticalization has highlighted cases where former inflectional affixes have gained independence on an unexpected path towards clitic or full-word status. Such cases challenge the hypothesized unidirectionality of grammaticalization at the formal level (word > clitic > affix). This article examines such developments, citing new evidence from the development of the person–number inflection of the conditional auxiliary in Slavonic. In some varieties, this comes to be identified with an existing clitic, the present tense of the perfect auxiliary ‘be’. This development is reminiscent of other cases where obsolescent morphology is reassigned to productive functions and which can best be treated as instances of exaptation–adaptation, a process which lacks directionality and frequently leads to counterdirectional change.

Starting from a type of variation in the pattern of definiteness checking in Old Romanian (16th to 18th century), which has never been noticed before, and from the realization of genitive phrases in Old Romanian, we examine the significance of these phenomena for the evolution of the Romanian definite article. We claim that the existence of the A [ def]+ N[+def]+ GenDP/PP structure in Old Romanian is significant for understanding the rise of the enclitic article. Of the many proposed solutions to this problem, we have retained two; both relate the enclitic article to features of Romanian which are/were not present (to the same extent) in other Romance languages. First, the development of the enclitic article has been related to the creation of the inflectional genitive (Coteanu 1956, Giusti 1991), with the suffixed article being the speller of the Case feature; in contrast, the other Romance languages developed a prepositional genitive. Secondly, the enclitic article was related to the strong preference for the post-position of the adjective, including the demonstrative adjective in Romanian, a preference strengthened by the same N+A order in the local Dacian idioms (Brâncuş 2004). Graur (1967), Renzi (1993) agree that the enclitic article develops by re-analysis of examples like homo ille bonus: the demonstrative, required as a licenser of the modifier, is re-analyzed as a constituent-part of the head noun: homo ille bonus [homo-ille] bonus. Both hypotheses are correct, but incomplete. Through our study of definiteness checking in Old Romanian, we prove that the Romanian definite article is a post-posed demonstrative, re-analyzed as a definite suffix. Secondly we claim that the development of the definite article out of a constituent which had [locative, deictic] features allowed the specialization of the Genitive into a referential anchoring Genitive co-occurring with the definite article and a non-anchored non-referential Genitive. Romanian thus verifies the typological generalization that only languages that have articles may develop specialized forms for anchoring vs. non-anchoring Gen (Koptjevskaya-Tamm 2005: 168). It is the correlation between the anchoring role of the Gen and the presence of the post-posed demonstrative which is still visible in the lower N[+def] examples noticed above. At the time of the lower N[+def] construction, the article was still interpretable as [locative, deictic]. The post-nominal demonstrative was required to license an anchoring inflected genitive, and was re-analyzed as the mark of an individuated, anchored head.

L’évolution de la négation en français est un des changements les plus étudiés dans la syntaxe (Schweighäuser 1852, Jespersen 1917, Yvon 1962, Martineau et Mougeon 2003 entre autres). C’est un des exemples les plus connus de grammaticalisation (Detges et Waltereit 2002, Hopper et Traugott 2003, Rostila 2006). Bybee et Thompson (2000) ont observé que la productivité d’une construction dépend largement de sa fréquence de type, et la résistance d’un item lexical face à un changement analogique dépend de sa fréquence d’occurrence. Mais à part Rostila (2006), ces théories des effets de fréquence n’ont pas encore été appliquées à l’évolution de la négation.

This thesis discusses diachronic developments in the expression of negation in Arabic and other Afro-Asiatic languages, focussing in particular on the set of changes known as ‘Jespersen’s Cycle’ – prototypically the progression from preverbal to bipartite to postverbal negation – as well as the development of indefinites in the scope of negation. Drawing together data on negation from a number of neighbouring
varieties of Arabic and Berber, as well as from Coptic and Modern South Arabian, this thesis defends from a linguistic and historical point of view the claim that bipartite negation in Arabic was triggered by contact with Coptic in Egypt, and separately with Modern South Arabian in Yemen and Oman, and that the same construction in Berber was in turn triggered by contact with Maghrebi Arabic. In light of the lack of an existing model of the psychological mechanisms which enable contact-induced
grammatical change, as opposed to the sociolinguistic factors which constrain it, an account of these mechanisms is developed, integrating Van Coetsem’s (1988, 2000) work on this topic with research on second language acquisition and first language attrition, as well as with acquisitionist approaches to (internal) change in general. This then enables an explicit account of the spread of bipartite negation in the languages under study. This account sees the bipartite construction in Arabic as the product of imposition (source-language agentivity) by native speakers of Coptic and Modern South Arabian, and its counterpart in Berber as the result of borrowing (recipient-language agentivity) by native Berber speakers from their second-language Arabic. The partial and complex progression from a bipartite to a postverbal negative construction in Palestinian Arabic is then examined in detail on the basis of original field data, in a case study of phonological input to syntactic change. Finally, the scope is widened to investigate a number of Jespersen-type developments in the Semitic and Cushitic languages of Ethiopia, as well as the development of n-words and negative indefinites in Palestinian and Moroccan Arabic, Maltese and Hebrew, where it is argued that, contrary to initial impressions, only the latter two have developed into bona fide negative concord languages.

Вопреки названию, работа посвящена не тому, как у предлогов русского языка появляются новые значения, а тому, каким образом они утрачиваются и в каких контекстах дольше сохраняются.
Диахроническое исследование ряда моделей управления с предлогами показывает, что идиоматическое сочетание предлога с управляющим словом является результатом сохранения при некоторых лексемах предлога в значении, в котором данный предлог больше не употребляется свободно (например, преимущество перед, защищать от). Рассматривается постепенное сужение круга лексем, с которыми употребляется определенный предлог в определенном значении, с одной стороны, и увеличение связанности предлога с отдельными лексемами, с другой стороны.

Journal of Celtic Linguistics (2016), 17, 147–239

While accounts of the syntax of the element usually called the 'verbal noun' are available for different periods of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, as well as the Brythonic languages, the details of verbal noun constructions in Manx have never been fully described. Thomson (1952: 285-89) deals cursorily with the topic, and touches on various aspects in his grammar of Early Manx (Thomson 1953: 51-4, 62-9), in two lectures (Thomson 1969, 1986) and in commentaries on Manx texts (Thomson 1981, 1998). The matter is also discussed briefly by Broderick (2010: 345-46). Many of their ideas and suggestions will be explored in depth here.

This paper focuses particularly on the way pronominal objects of verbal nouns are expressed (whether by means of a possessive proclitic or as an object personal pronoun), and how this is related to the changing analysis of the verbal noun in Manx (and to varying extents the other Celtic languages), from a noun to a non-finite verb. The shift is examined in terms of reanalysis and grammaticalization, with particular reference to the common cross-linguistic phenomenon of the development of verbal nouns into infinitives and other non-finite verbal elements.

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/uwp/jcl/2016/00000017/00000001/art00005

The article shows the issue of syntactic loans in the Russian language and the potential ability of Russian to loan syntactic constructions and to adapt them to its language system. In the paper we present examples from the history of the Russian language which prove syntactic transformations resulted from lexical loans. The study result demonstrates the syntactic transformations prerequisites in Russian syntax, conditioned by lexical loans from the English language.
---------------
В настоящей статье рассматривается проблема возможности синтаксических заимствований в русском языке. Затрагивается вопрос потенциальной возможности русского языка заимствовать синтаксические конструкции и адаптировать их к своей языковой системе. Приводится пример из истории русского языка, демонстрирующий синтаксические трансформации в результате лексических заимствований. Результат исследования демонстрирует предпосылки к синтаксическим трансформациям в русском синтаксисе, обусловленные лексическими заимствованиями из английского языка.

In this paper we focus on the behaviour of prenominal genitives in Old Romanian in contrast with Modern Romanian. In the old language, the prenominal genitive is more widely used and occurs in three distinct configurations: (i) it is a determiner genitive in DP-initial position and checks the definiteness feature of D in a local configuration, (ii) it is a lower determiner genitive which checks the definiteness feature of D across an intervening constituent, and (iii) it is an attributive/property genitive, similar to the attributive genitive of English and to the genitival adjectives of (certain) Slavic languages. Of these three distinct configurations, only the first one is still available in Modern Romanian. In trying to provide an explanation for the loss of some of the prenominal genitive patterns, we relate this phenomenon to changes in syntax of the definite article.

This paper investigates the development of sentential negation in Middle High German using sermons from the Upper German dialect area. To this end, a heterogeneous yet fine-grained corpus of Alemannic and Bavarian sermons is analysed with respect to diachronic development, geographical distribution and language-internal factors. What becomes clear is that Jespersen's Cycle, a cross-linguistic model of the development of negation that can be seen as part of the received history of German negation, fails to account for the mechanisms in the development of sentential negation in German. These mechanisms cannot be understood independently of the – in some respects parallel – development of n-indefinites. It appears that the interplay of variation and the grammaticalisation of the n-indefinite nicht, which co-occurred with ne but could also appear on its own, played a more important role in the emergence of the negation particle nicht than previously thought. It is argued that when nicht was grammaticalised it retained the variation of the n-indefinite nicht, and that the subsequent loss of ne was a parallel development in both usages of nicht.

This paper deals with the person agreement on two converbs in Udmurt (Finno-Ugric). Firstly, it is discussed whether the agreement markers used on the converbs should be considered clitics or not. Secondly, it is discussed whether we are dealing with pronominal agreement. It is argued that the agreement markers used on the converbs have mixed properties: they seem highly referential, which supports the pronominal agreement analysis. However, based on fieldwork with native speakers of Udmurt, it turns out that many speakers allow subject-doubling of the agreement markers with an overt DP. The possibility of subject-doubling is analyzed as evidence for an ongoing change according to which the former pronominal agreement is turning into grammatical agreement. The paper also draws parallels with other Finno-Ugric languages (Hungarian, Finnish, Northern Khanty).

Preprint, 10/03/2017
To appear in Kiefer, F., Blevins, J., and Bartos, H. (eds.), Morphological Paradigms and Functions. Leiden, Brill.

Morphosyntactic dialect variation, once a neglected area of dialect research, has recently witnessed a large growth in interest. Various methods from geospatial data analysis have been applied to morphosyntactic data. To date, the focus has largely been on analysing the distribution of stable patterns of variation. This article extends this work to examine patterns of ongoing change. It uses a body of data from the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects and the Siarad Corpus of spoken Welsh to examine the innovation and diffusion of a new second person
singular pronoun, chdi, examining the usefulness of Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) as a method for identifying and modelling patterns of ongoing syntactic change. It is shown that GWR provides plausible models of the diachronic development of changes that are still in progress. Furthermore, it allows us to test whether rates of change are constant across geographical space, allowing us to test whether the Constant Rate Hypothesis (that diffusion of change proceeds at the same rate in different environments) holds between dialects.

This article discusses similar developments in the expression of negation in the histories of Egyptian-Coptic and Arabic and explores the evidence for these respective developments being related by language contact. Both Coptic and Arabic have
undergone a development known as Jespersen’s Cycle (JC), whereby an original negative marker is joined by some new element to form a bipartite negative construction.
The original marker then becomes optional while the new element becomes the primary negator. We present the results of a corpus study of negation in late Coptic, showing that, at the time when Arabic speakers began to settle in Egypt, the
bipartite negative construction still predominated. This being the case, we argue that native speakers of Coptic learning Arabic as a second language played a key role in the genesis of the Arabic bipartite negative construction. More generally, we give reasons to doubt the a priori preference for internal explanations of syntactic change over those involving contact, as well as the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive. Rather, we suggest that not only purely internal but also (partially) contactinduced change can profitably be accounted for in terms of child language acquisition leading to a change in the grammars of individual speakers.

The study is based on the text corpus (live stories and tales) recorded from narrators belonging to different dialects of Evenki. A corpus displays spontaneous speech whose analysis can give results different from those bases on elicitation. Such poorly studied aspects of Evenki grammar as word order and verb grammatical categories are discussed. Even though verb morphology has been thoroughly studied (e.g. by B.V.Boldyrev, based on the literary language), the oral speech corpus allows us to trace the tendencies of changes in the language that show up in oral speech. The data are analyzed and compared to data from grammars and to earlier oral speech records from 1930-th. Chapter 1 considers word order in Evenki. Evenki can be considered an SOV language or an OV/VO language. We advocate the position the Evenki is an OV language with free word order. We fix two main factors that trigger the shift from the OV order to the VO order: (1) communicative structure and discourse factors; (2) Russian word order influence. Chapter 2 considers verb categories. The oral language has preserved all of the grammatical positions of the Evenki verb, including the ‘derivation affix slot’ (synthetic constructions). However, not all of the affixes that can show up in this slot are not widely used, especially among narrators that are younger and/or use Russian in their everyday speech. There is a tendency for synthetic constructions with these affixes to be substituted by quasi-synonymous analytic constructions. Tense inflection (future) is also analyzed. The data that shows a lot of uses of Future forms not for future reference, and the comparison with Russian Future forms use allow us to track the influence of Russian on the use of Evenki tense affixes.. Issues of new verb forms grammaticalizaton and argument structure are also touched.
The data and results of the monograph are relevant for both typological studies and the language contact theory related first of all to small and extinct languages in Russia.
As an annex to the monograph, four live stories and two tales (prepared for print and glossed by E.L. Klyachko (Elena Klyachko)) are included. The annex gives samples of texts from the corpus.

Chapter overview: preliminaries; Middle as a cluster of deagentivized (Intransitivized) syntactic patterns; Middle types/patterns; Middle voice in Indo-European and beyond: The range of variation; Middle and reflexive in a diachronic perspective
Concluding terminological remarks: Reflexive sensu stricto vs.
"reflexive" as a cover term

Practitioners of syntactic reconstruction have not acknowledged that arbitrariness and iconicity influence syntactic change, and that they therefore need to be incorporated into methods of reconstruction. I argue that iconicity creates a directional tendency in syntactic change, privileging structures that are more iconic. I propose a method for incorporating this fact into methods of syntactic reconstruction. I demonstrate the application of this method on two pieces of reconstructed syntax: orientation serial verb constructions and left-peripheral topics. Both case studies are from Proto-Sogeram, the ancestor to ten languages of Papua New Guinea. A third, briefer case study concerns Proto-Carib.

Undergraduate dissertation 2014. Kroch’s (1989) paper Reflexes of Grammar in Patterns of Language Change introduced the Constant Rate Hypothesis (CRH) to historical linguistics. The CRH states that when two functionally equivalent underlying syntactic variants are in competition such that one is replacing the other, the rate of replacement over time is the same in all surface contexts. Such "sameness" is determined through statistically comparing the logistic transformation of the S-shape of plotted corpus data. Both the statistical and theoretical assertions of the CRH are examined within this undergraduate dissertation.

Part I explores the issues that face the linguist when attempting to use the equation. It is aimed at those who, like me, usually just skip over graphs to reach the linguistic conclusions. Part I will conclude that the mathematical grounding of these should be exposed to as much scrutiny as the linguistic theories receive.

Part II aims to address a concern raised by Hale (2007) that there is no reason why a change should surface at the same rate. Use of the CRH equation on data from extralinguistic contexts of gender and social class raises questions over the overall applicability of the CRH.

The dissertation will conclude that the ambiguity of use of the CRH afforded by underspecification of its equation and terms means it is very flexible to confirming the linguist's assumptions. It appears that the relationship of the CRH to the epiphenomenon of S-shaped change is more deeply entrenched than first appears. The CRH does not therefore warrant the description of "unequivocal" that some variationist linguists have afforded it.

This thesis investigates the question of whether it is possible, or desirable, to use the comparative method as applied in phonological reconstruction to identify syntactic correspondences. I show that approaches proposed in the literature (e.g. by Lehmann 1974 or Harris & Campbell 1995) are problematic either because they do not follow the comparative method or because they do not do so in a principled enough fashion; objections raised in the literature (e.g. by Lightfoot 2002a) are then assessed, and I argue that most of these constitute no obstacle to syntactic reconstruction. I then sketch a method for applying the comparative method to syntactic reconstruction through comparison of the features of lexical items, including exponents of functional heads, applying an idea popular in current Minimalist thinking. This approach is then illustrated using examples drawn from the older Germanic languages: the Old Norse middle voice, the West Germanic inflected infinitive, and V-to-C movement. I suggest that pursuing an isomorphism between phonological and syntactic change has the potential to bear fruit in syntactic reconstruction, even if the parallels cannot be universally maintained.

We discuss a type of variation in the pattern of definiteness valuation in Old Romanian (16th to 18th century), which has never been noticed before, and examine its significance for the evolution of the DP. In Old Romanian, the suffixed definite article variably occurs either on the first or on a lower [+N] constituent (noun or adjective), so that an indefinite adjective may precede the definite noun. In contrast, in Modern Romanian, it is always the first noun which bears the definite article, while, in case an adjective precedes the noun, the definite article occurs on the adjective. The existence of this lower (definite) article raises several questions (the contexts where it occurs, its significance for the emergence of the enclitic definite article, etc.), to which this paper provides tentative answers. We propose that the existence of a lower definite article combined with a tendency for economy made possible the extension of the use of the article to (pre-nominal) adjectives, gradually leading to stricter conditions in the valuation of definiteness in Modern Romanian (Local Agree). At the same time, the lower article is evidence that the Romanian enclitic definite article originates in a post-posed demonstrative.

Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) calculates the degree of semantic equivalence between two textual snippets, even though they do not share common words. The textual snippets are words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs or documents. In this work, the textual snippets are sentences. The similarity between the sentences can be measured with the aid of lexical, syntactic and semantic features entrenched in the sentences. In SemEval workshop, the STS task is to measure the semantic similarity between the sentence pairs. The dataset contains the sentence pairs and the human annotated real values from 0-5. In this paper, the experimental analysis of various lexical, syntactic and semantic features on STS 2016 dataset is carried out. This analysis is useful while building the models with machine learning algorithms with the aid of these features. The impact of the individual features on semantic textual equivalence is assessed between the feature generated values and human annotated values using Pearson Correlation Coefficient.

Paper delivered at Teangeolaíocht na Gaeilge conference, Maynooth University, 2015.

In this paper I argue that the use of the substantive verb with noun predicate (Irish *tá sé fear) is an internal development in Manx, rather than a symptom of the language's 'creolized' nature or 'simplification' (Ó Sé 1991: 170, Williams 1994: 738-740). In no period of Manx does the substantive verb supplant the copula and substantive verb + preposition constructions; rather the different constructions co-exist (indeed some Manx copula constructions are more conservative than Scottish Gaelic), their distribution apparently determined by the semantics of permanence v. transience, tense, syntactic complexity etc. Evidence from corpora of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Manx will be used to illustrate this distribution. I argue that the emergence of the substantive verb + noun predicate construction is to be explained by 1) the lack of an augmented past / conditional form of the copula (Scottish Gaelic b' e) 2) the lack of the development of the clefted construction with the preposition 'in' (Scottish Gaelic is e tidsear a tha annam) 3) emergence of substantive verb to clarify tense of copula (e.g. she dooinney mie v'eh 'he was a good man'), which then leads to v'eh / t'eh dooinney mie 'he was / is a good man' as the unfocused equivalent.

Hopper, Paul J. 2015 “Hermann Paul’s Emergent Grammar.” In Peter Auer and Robert Murray, eds., Hermann Paul’s Principles of Language History Revisited: Translations and Reflections, 237-56. Berlin: De Gruyter.
In the first half of this paper, paragraph boundaries were omitted. This was a printing error, not an editing one. I am sorry, and hope you will wade through it -- it gets better later. - Paul Hopper

"The Syntax of Old Romanian" is a timely and important contribution to the field of Romanian historical linguistics, and it is also a valuable resource for comparative Romance linguists. Intended as a complementary continuation of The Grammar of Romanian (Pană Dindelegan, 2013), which offers a synchronic account of the present-day language, the volume under review focuses on the period between 1500 and 1780, from the date of the oldest preserved Romanian texts to the final stages of what is generally considered ‘Old Romanian’.

As opposed to the ancient IE varieties in which overt vs. null realization of referential subjects was largely determined by discourse factors, some modern IE languages of Europe have lost null subjects to different extents. These include all Germanic languages, French and some Northern Italian vernacular varieties (Romance), and Russian. This development raises a number of interesting issues, such as the role of language contact, what started the (partial or complete) loss of referential null subjects in the three languages families in the first place, and whether attested developments are parallel or show significant differences. The talk addresses these and other issues through a description of historical phases of the languages involved.

The concept of 'renewal' is widely used in the literature on morphosyntactic change, but hardly ever theorized. Here we scrutinize the viability of this concept theoretically as well as empirically, revisiting in detail the most frequently cited case of renewal, namely the resemblance between the Latin and French synthetic futures. Phenomena accounted for in terms of renewal can also be accounted for in terms of grammaticalization theory. We argue that there is no need and no empirical support for renewal as its own type of change alongside grammaticalization. However, grammati-calization theory so far has neglected to properly account for influences of the existing system on ongoing grammaticalization processes. As an initial approximation of this vast field of study, we propose several domains where we believe that system influences on grammaticalization are operative. On the one hand, this involves making more precise the source determination hypothesis as developed in work by Joan Bybee and colleagues. On the other, it comprises interactions between constructions in paradigm formation.* 1. Introduction. This article is concerned with the question of whether the renewal of grammatical categories is a useful and theoretically viable concept in analyzing and explaining morphosyntactic change. As renewal is concerned with the development of grammatical constructions, it covers at least partially the same ground as grammatical-ization theory. Hence, the viability of renewal as a process sui generis depends in part on the question of whether it can account for aspects of the development of grammatical constructions not well covered by grammaticalization theory. We argue here that the answer to this question is 'no': renewal is not a type of grammatical change, since it lacks theoretical coherence and empirical support. The view, occasionally found in the literature , that renewal pertains to aspects of morphosyntactic change not well addressed by grammaticalization theory arises from that theory's neglect of the fact that the existing language system may influence the development of grammatical constructions in various ways. Consequently, we argue, what is needed is not a theory of renewal, but rather a substantial revision of grammaticalization theory so as to explicitly take into account the fact that grammatical change does not happen in a vacuum. The notion of 'renewal' 1 is widely used in language histories and in literature on language change and appears in the title of Meillet's famous article 'Le renouvellement des conjonctions'. 2 He claims in this article that the repeated disappearance and new creation

RÉSUMÉ Traditionnellement, la différence typologique principale entre le latin et les langues romanes résiderait dans une distinction entre morphologie et syntaxe : tandis que le latin recourt principalement aux structures synthétiques (en concomitance avec un ordre des mots dit libre), les variétés romanes morphologiquement moins riches ont largement recours aux structures analytiques (en concomitance avec un ordre des mots fixe). Selon une opinion populaire, cette différence refléterait un passage de la non-configurationnalité à la configurationnalité : en latin les relations entre les différents lexèmes sont signalées par la forme des lexèmes mêmes grâce à un système de flexions casuelles et d'accord très riches, alors que dans les langues romanes les relations entre les lexèmes associés sont codées par leurs positions fixes les uns par rapport aux autres. Malgré les aperçus précieux offerts par cette approche configurationnelle, on développe une approche alternative des changements de l'organisation structurelle du latin dans le passage aux langues romanes qui présuppose déjà la présence de la configurationnalité et de la structure fonctionnelle en latin depuis ses origines. De ce point de vue, les différences incontestables entre latin et langues romanes, notamment le remplacement d'un ordre des mots pragmatiquement déterminé par un ordre de plus en plus grammaticalement déterminé et l'apparition parallèle des catégories fonctionnelles, se prêtent à une explication en fonction de changements formels relatifs au paramètre de la directionnalité de la tête et au rôle différentiel de la structure fonctionnelle dans les deux variétés. SUMMARY Traditionally, the principal typological difference between Latin and Romance has been taken to involve a distinction between morphology and syntax: while Latin predominantly makes recourse to synthetic structures (with concomitant so-called free word order), the morphologically poorer Romance varieties make greater use of analytic structures (with concomitant fixed word order). According to one popular view, this difference involves a move from non-configurationality to full configurationality: whereas in Latin grammatical relations are encoded by the forms of words themselves through case and agreement morphology, in Romance

Georgian is usually described as a highly synthetic language. In this paper, we examine an analytical construction which emerged in the last few decades, possibly under the influence of a similar Russian construction. We examine the structural similarities between the two constructions and focus on their discourse / pragmatic functions. We argue that the Georgian construction is used to make the speaker sound authoritative and official, while the Russian construction serves mostly to de-emphasize the role of the agent in an event. We explore the development of the Georgian construction and possible cultural routes by which it acquired its sociolinguistic load.

One consistent finding across sociolinguistic studies is the tendency for female speakers to lead in ongoing change. Different explanations have been proposed for this and a key method of testing these explanations is to identify whether the pattern occurs in the languages of a wider range of societies than have been studied thus far. Historical societies are relatively understudied in this regard, but undertaking variationist research into gender in historical varieties presents many challenges. One way to overcome these is to examine variation internal to fiction data. This paper presents an analysis of the effect of gender on the adverb selected for sentential negation in Old Norse prose fiction. It finds that female characters lead consistently in this change over time. In doing so, it demonstrates the feasibility of using fiction data when examining the effect of gender in historical varieties such as Old Norse.

PRE-PRINT DRAFT

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830528.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780198830528-e-31

This chapter reviews the diachronic processes affecting indefinites in the scope of negation and other nominal elements that enter the negation system as strengtheners of the sentential negative marker. Changes involving indefinites interweave with Jespersen’s Cycle because changes in the syntactic nature of the negative marker may lead to the creation of syntactic dependencies between negative items in the clause. In turn, indefinites themselves are subject to diachronic clines and cyclical processes of change modifying their pragmatic and semantic properties and renewing their form and their featural content. A particularly intriguing systematic phenomenon leads originally positive elements to become more ‘negative’, in ways that will be explored in this chapter by means of examples from the diachrony of various languages.

This chapter is a case study in syntactic reanalysis leading to grammaticalization. It investigates the history of Modern Irish comparative particle ná 'than', and shows how it has developed phonologically, morphologically, and syntactically from an Old Irish phrase ol/ind daäs 'beyond how it is'. Two reanalyses are proposed: first, the verb daäs in T is reanalyzed as C in gapping contexts; second, C (daäs) is cliticized to P (ol) and reanalyzed as a morphological part of P in subcomparatives. The chapter shows that the first reanalysis can be characterized as formal grammaticalization, while the second does not appear formal grammaticalization (upward reanalysis), but merely 'morphologization'; although it is grammaticalization in the strictly functional sense. Besides the two reanalyses, the chapter explains several surface extensions of these reanalyses: loss of tense marking, changes in case marking, and exaptation/analogical reformation of verbal agreement marking as the comparative marker became more particle-like.

Enclitic distribution in Greek (and archaic Indo-European generally) is governed by a set of generalizations known as wackernagel's law, according to which enclitics occur in " second position. " As has long been known, surface exceptions to Wacker-nagel's Law in Homer are uncommon, but in Herodotus are far more frequent. Wack-ernagel himself attributed this difference to syntactic change: in Homer a single mechanism is responsible for second-position clitic distribution, while in Herodotus the old second-position rule competes with new placement rules. Although the nature of these innovative mechanisms has never been explicated, philologists have adopted this view with apparent unanimity. The central claim of this paper is that the alleged syntactic change is an illusion. What Wackernagel and others have observed in Homer and Herodotus is a difference in usage, not grammar. Specifically, Herodotus uses constructions that yield non-canonical surface patterns (i.e., the clitic is not " second " in its clause) more often than Homer. As the same generalizations capture the distribution of clitics in both Homer and Herodotus, there is no validity to the claim that Wacker-nagel's Law is weaker in the classical period than in the archaic, or that there are new distributional rules at work.

This article investigates themorphosyntactic status of dative case in Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. We hypothesize that these three languages represent three diachronic stages signalled synchronically by the degree of preservation or non-preservation of dative under movement. Thus, we explore the synchronic status of dative under passive movement and topicalization in the three languages, while simultaneously paying attention to the larger questions of diachronic preservation and non-preservation of dative. We suggest that our findings have interesting ramifications for the categorization of case as structural and non-structural in generative grammar.

Contra the standard account by Maling & Sigurjónsdóttir (2002), I argue that the New Passive in Icelandic is a passive without NP-movement but with structural accusative case assignment. The absence of structural accusative in the Canonical Passive and its presence in the New Passive is attributed to parametric variation in a case feature in a functional head taking a VP complement. Thus, the New Passive is comparable to the -no/to-construction in Ukrainian, a passive preserving structural accusative case. Moreover, parallels in Norwegian and Faroese are pointed out. Finally, I propose that the New Passive emerged from a reanalysis of the canonical existential passive (það-passive) with a postverbal NP. The locus for the reanalysis involves cases where the canonical existential passive without NP-movement and the New Passive cannot be distinguished morphologically.

Este trabalho apresenta um estudo da ordem dos clíticos em cartas pessoais trocadas entre membros das famílias Pedreira Ferraz – Abreu Magalhães, Frazão Braga, Salgado Lacerda, os noivos Jayme e Maria e diferentes missivistas oriundos de diferentes regiões do Brasil, todos nascidos ao longo do século XIX e XX. Considerando resultados de trabalhos anteriores sobre colocação pronominal e as características da gramática do PB (BRITO; DUARTE; MATOS, 2003; PAGOTTO; DUARTE, 2005; MARTINS, 2010 e CAVALCANTE; DUARTE; PAGOTTO, 2011, entre outros), nosso objetivo é (1) mostrar a implementação da próclise na escrita de brasileiros em formas verbais simples ao longo do tempo e (2) testar a hipótese de M. A. Martins, que mostra competição de gramáticas no contexto de próclise com XV, afirmando haver diferença na frequência de realização dos pronomes com verbo precedido por Sujeito Pronominal, por Sujeito SN e por ADVP-PP. Para tanto, utilizamos uma metodologia quantitativa para a análise de dados, considerando somente sentenças matrizes com verbo na primeira posição e na segunda posição. Os resultados encontrados, em síntese, nos permitem antecipar que, apesar de haver contextos resistentes à entrada da próclise devido às pressões normativas, como contexto de #V1, a partir da segunda metade do século XX, os pronomes átonos se realizam majoritariamente proclíticos. Além disso, com relação ao contexto XV, a partir da segunda metade do século XX, a próclise é categórica, independentemente do tipo de sintagma que antecede o verbo, o que não corrobora a hipótese de M. A. Martins (2010).