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- Volume 21, Issue, 2004
Diachronica - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2004
Volume 21, Issue 2, 2004
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Reconstruction through ‘de-construction’: The marking of person, gender, and number in the Khoe family and Kwadi
Author(s): Tom Güldemannpp.: 251–306 (56)More LessKwadi is a virtually unknown and probably extinct click language of southwestern Angola. It has thus far not been assigned conclusively to any genealogical language group in Africa. Apart from being subsumed under the non-genealogical label ‘Khoisan’, the only concrete hypothesis has been to affiliate it with the Khoe family, also known as Central Khoisan. Based on my own analysis of the available linguistic data, the first systematic treatment to have been undertaken, the paper provides first empirical substantiation for this hypothesis by presenting evidence for numerous commonalities between the Khoe family and Kwadi involving the marking of person, gender, and number. The resulting reconstruction of Proto-Khoe-Kwadi forms and their organization in a so-called ‘minimal-augmented’ pronoun system also sheds new light on the design of the marking system of Proto-Khoe.
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Syncope and foot structure in pre-Ashkenazic Hebrew
Author(s): Neil G. Jacobspp.: 307–327 (21)More LessThis paper examines a set of problems concerning word stress in the substratal Merged Hebrew component in Yiddish. When compared with their historical cognates in Classical Hebrew, the Yiddish words show a stress pattern which appears to conform to the Germanic trochee. The change has frequently been seen as occurring within the history of Yiddish. The present paper demonstrates, however, that (for the relevant Hebrew-origin items) the change from a Hebrew iamb to a trochee necessarily occurred in a period after spoken Hebrew times and before the birth of Yiddish – thus, within one or more intervening Jewish vernaculars. This is demonstrated by consideration of pre-Ashkenazic Hebrew foot structure in light of two historically distinct processes of syncope.
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The origin of the Welsh conjugated infinitive
Author(s): D. Gary Millerpp.: 329–350 (22)More LessSeveral issues of theoretical, typological, and historical interest are investigated. Conjugated infinitives (those with subject person agreement) are relatively rare but sufficiently well documented as to prompt some linguists to question the efficacy of the wordnonfinite. Moreover, the conjugated infinitives that have received attention in the literature share significant properties crosslinguistically, which cannot be accidental. Historically, however, they require salient triggering data in contrast to prototypical infinitives (those without person agreement), which spontaneously evolve from nominalizations with a goal role. The Welsh case is particularly interesting because the infinitive remains characterized byi“to” + verbal noun, and it is less than obvious that Welsh has a conjugated infinitive (CI). Reanalysis of inflected prepositions (e.g., Middle Welshi-daw“to him”) to infinitives with agreement (moderni-ddo“to-3SGM” ) yielded CIs. This reanalysis was forced by a semantic change of some control to causative verbs. The spread of the new CI to other predicates was enabled by a different kind of reanalysis, this one purely syntactic, raising yet another issue of general interest.
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From transitive to causative in Japanese: Morphologization through exaptation
Author(s): Heiko Narrogpp.: 351–392 (42)More LessModern Japanese has a morphological causative, formed by suffixes on the verb, and lexical causatives. The morphological causative has been in use since Late Old Japanese. However, the etymology of this morphological causative and the status of related causative formations in Old Japanese remain unclear. This paper supports the view that lexical causative formations in Old Japanese are the direct predecessors of the morphological causative. In their morphological, syntactic, and semantic features they form a chain of morphologization with the productive causative that emerged from them. Similar diachronic developments have also been observed in Sanskrit and North American languages. Thus, the formation of a morphological causative from a lexical pattern, a path of development that has received little attention, seems to constitute a crosslinguistically valid source for the evolution of productive causatives. It is proposed that the type of change observed here is an exaptation of fossilized morphological material, which, in several important aspects, runs counter to the directionality of change posited in mainstream grammaticalization theory.
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Lexical imposition: Old Norse vocabulary in Scottish Gaelic
Author(s): Thomas W. Stewart, Jr.pp.: 393–420 (28)More LessA population of Norse settlers in the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland eventually shifted from Old Norse to the contemporary Gaelic of the established community. Although little direct evidence of the sociolinguistic conditions of the contact situation exists, an unusual sound pattern found among the words transferred from Old Norse into Scottish Gaelic suggests that an unexpectedly large number of words beginning with /s/+[stop] clusters were transferred under Norse-speaker agency (viaimposition) rather than under Gaelic-speaker agency (viaborrowing).
Volumes & issues
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Volume 41 (2024)
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Volume 40 (2023)
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Volume 39 (2022)
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Volume 38 (2021)
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Volume 37 (2020)
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Volume 36 (2019)
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Volume 35 (2018)
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Volume 34 (2017)
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Volume 33 (2016)
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Volume 32 (2015)
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Volume 31 (2014)
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Volume 30 (2013)
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Volume 29 (2012)
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Volume 28 (2011)
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Volume 27 (2010)
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Volume 26 (2009)
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Volume 25 (2008)
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Volume 24 (2007)
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Volume 23 (2006)
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Volume 22 (2005)
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Volume 21 (2004)
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Volume 20 (2003)
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Volume 19 (2002)
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Volume 18 (2001)
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Volume 17 (2000)
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Volume 16 (1999)
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Volume 15 (1998)
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Volume 14 (1997)
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Volume 13 (1996)
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Volume 12 (1995)
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Volume 11 (1994)
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Volume 10 (1993)
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Volume 9 (1992)
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Volume 8 (1991)
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Volume 7 (1990)
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Volume 6 (1989)
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Volume 5 (1988)
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Volume 4 (1987)
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Volume 3 (1986)
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Volume 2 (1985)
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Volume 1 (1984)
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What happened to English?
Author(s): John McWhorter
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