Diachronica - Volume 28, Issue 3, 2011

This paper analyzes newly collected lexical data from 26 languages of the Aslian subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family using computational phylogenetic methods. We show the most likely topology of the Aslian family tree, discuss rooting and external relationships to other Austroasiatic languages, and investigate differences in the rates of diversification of different branches. Evidence is given supporting the classification of Jah Hut as a fourth top level subgroup of the family. The phylogenetic positions of known geographic and linguistic outlier languages are clarified, and the relationships of the little studied Aslian languages of Southern Thailand to the rest of the family are explored.

This study aims to specify to what extent the variation introduced in the Estonian object-marking system by Russian-dominant Estonian L2 speakers is spreading to the native usage of Estonian. 669 secondary school students completed a written production task and a grammaticality judgment task on object marking. The results indicate that the object-marking variation is contact-induced and that the group of fluent bilinguals acts as a bridge for impositional innovations to enter and to be accepted by native speakers. The findings also suggest that multiple causal forces influence the diffusion of innovations. While any single causal factor may drive diffusion if it is strong enough, the process is greatly facilitated when different causal factors contribute to the same direction. In this case, fairly weak contact is sufficient to induce diffusion.

Current analyses present lexical borrowing as a pervasive phenomenon in pre-colonial Australia. They propose that this follows from the high levels of multilingualism and language group exogamy which characterized pre-colonial sociality. This article shows that lexical borrowing was not pervasive in Australia, arguing that there is no necessary or even default relation between high levels of multilingualism and language group exogamy, and high levels of borrowing. These social phenomena may equally be accompanied by extremes of lexical differentiation between languages. Australia provides many examples of such differentiation. The paper also argues that there are no examples of the borrowing of lexical material from irregular paradigms in Australia. As such, the sharing of lexical material from irregular paradigms is a reliable guide to genetic relations in Australia.

This article provides an account of the shift in the expression of the internal argument of a small class of dynamic two-place verbs best represented by aider “help” from ‘dative’, i.e., as an indirect object with the preposition à, to ‘accusative’, i.e., as a direct object with no preposition. This change is not correlated with a change in the meaning of the verbs or with any obvious change in the selectional restrictions imposed on the internal argument. One of the central results of this study is to demonstrate that the shift in argument realization was systematic and part of a broader change involving the loss of directionality as a property of prepositions in French, explaining its correlation with several other related changes in verbal complementation that also occurred in the 15th century.