Diachronica - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2003

The seemingly contradictory influences of r on neighboring sounds in the early Germanic languages have fueled controversy over r’s articulation in Proto-Germanic and later dialects. In this paper, we examine a number of these early Germanic sound changes and compare their effects to those observed in recent phonetic studies of the coarticulation of different types of r on adjacent vowels. We conclude that an apical trill and a central approximant r are phonetically the most likely conditioners of the earliest Germanic sound changes, while later changes can be accounted for by rhotics which were phonetically related to these earlier articulations.

Although conjugated infinitives (CIs) occur in languages as diverse as Portuguese, Welsh, Hungarian, and West Greenlandic, the prototypical infinitive is nonfinite in the traditional sense: it has no subject person agreement. This paper argues that CIs are special in the sense that they cannot arise spontaneously in the course of language acquisition. Even in languages with obligatory agreement, CIs require salient triggers. Two common sources are identified: (1) purposive subjunctives; (2) pronominal elements (e.g., construed with a nominalization). These sources require one of two kinds of reanalysis, generally based on a surface ambiguity. In all of the cases documented here, more than one of these factors interacted to trigger a CI.

Many Japanese historical linguists reconstruct a four-vowel system without *e and *o for Proto-Japonic (PJ), the ancestor of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages. However, a few (Unger 1993 [1977], Hattori 1978–79, Thorpe 1983, Serafim 1999a, 1999b) have reconstructed PJ *e and *o. Until now, arguments for PJ *e and *o have been based on (a) Japonic internal and comparative reconstructions and (b) Japonic languages attested from the eighth century onward. In this paper I test the PJ *e and *o hypothesis using two other types of evidence: pre-eighth century transcriptions and Sino-Japanese readings borrowed prior to the eighth century.

The present study analyzes both diachronically and typologically the synchronically irregular Spanish syntagm, entre tú y yo “between you and me”, which employs the subject pronouns, tú and yo, rather than the expected prepositional pronouns, ti and mí. First, a thorough examination of Old Spanish texts reveals that the Old Spanish syntagm did indeed exhibit prepositional pronouns, i.e., OSp. entre mí & ti (a fact virtually unknown to specialists of Spanish historical grammar), thus unveiling a syntactic change from entre mí & ti > entre tú y yo. Next, the change is compared to the typologically similar ongoing change in Modern English, namely, between you and me > between you and I. It is then shown here that although the change in these languages appears, on the surface, to be an exact parallel, the origin, or cause, of the change in each language is different. Nevertheless, certain factors — including the ultimate inability of the preposition to govern the second of two conjoined elements, as well as word-order patterns of the subject pronouns — were indeed found to have played a role in the development of both entre tú y yo and between you and I.