Diachronica - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2007

This paper is about internal reconstruction and the history of Chulupí, a Matacoan language of Argentina and Paraguay. We apply internal reconstruction and postulate several sound changes in the history of Chulupí. We bring the results of this internal reconstruction to bear on external comparisons based on cognates in other Matacoan languages, and in this way we check the validity of the internal reconstruction and contribute to aspects of Matacoan historical linguistics. We discuss some methodological implications for internal reconstruction in general and its relationship to the comparative method.

The unique documentation of the Iranian family of languages provides a rare opportunity to study the development of a verbal system over the span of several millennia. We argue that the rise of the Early New Persian aspectual type was a consequence of the loss of ergative typology, examining the rise of continuous and progressive aspects, and further development in the retrospective aspect, most notably the appearance of the perfect continuous. Another section is devoted to the study of the rise of the innovative ‘become’-passive. In both sections we pay special attention to the appearance of New Persian surcomposé formations and we review their analysis in the context of a number of interesting parallels in other IE and non-IE languages, pointing out some avenues for further comparative research in this area (especially the trend of the perfect and its surcomposé formations to develop inferential meaning). To strengthen our argument, we look at diverging developments in several Khorasani dialects which recall the Early New Persian state of affairs.

Through the history of Nordic and Norwegian, the infinitive marker has undergone several syntactic and phonological changes. This article discusses the syntactic changes in terms of functionalist and generativist grammaticalization theory. The article starts with a brief review of the origin and use of the infinitive marker in Germanic, followed by a presentation of the syntactic characteristics of infinitive constructions in Old Norse, where the author offers arguments in support of analyzing the infinitive marker as a complementizer word. In Middle and Early Modern Norwegian, the infinitive marker is reanalyzed as a clitic adjoined to the verb. A later reanalysis in Modern Norwegian has resulted in the infinitive marker once again occupying the complementizer position. The history of the Norwegian infinitive marker thus exhibits different types of grammaticalization (lexical word > grammatical word, and word > clitic), degrammaticalization (clitic > word), and different kinds of realization of a functional category.

Traditionally three independent types of analogical change in inflectional paradigms are distinguished: proportional analogy, paradigmatic leveling and analogical extension. However, the investigation of the data reveals that out of these types only that of proportional analogy can be empirically verified, being supported by clear evidence from languages with well documented history. Moreover, as shown by data from Russian, Old High German dialects, Old Saxon, Old English, and Latin, even in the most secure cases of paradigmatic leveling or analogical extension found in the literature the assumption of proportional analogy is either probable or cannot be excluded. Consequently the three traditional types of analogical change seem to differ with respect to their ontological status. On the one hand, paradigmatic leveling, i.e. the elimination of allomorphy in inflectional paradigms, is to be viewed merely as a motivation for change whose operating principle really is proportional analogy. On the other hand, analogical extension, i.e., the extension of already existing inflection forms through affixes with comparable function, seems to be just a possible way to describe the results of changes which, again, may in fact be instances of proportional analogy. These findings have the following implications for linguistic theory and practice. In practical work on inflectional morphology paradigmatic leveling and analogical extension without the use of proportional analogy can no longer be used in explanations on reconstructed stages of language development. All proposed explanations of this kind are to be supported by establishing an underlying proportional analogy or reconsidered if this is impossible. The proposed distinction between the motivational factors of change, to which paradigmatic leveling may belong, and its operational principle, which always seems to be proportional analogy, leads to a new three-level model of analogical change in inflectional paradigms: On the first level there are the motivational factors, on the second the proportional relations, and on the third level we find the factors governing the choice of a particular proportional relation. Furthermore, it can be shown that a number of morphological processes that have been described recently, such as the spread of the so called ‘superstable inflectional markers’ in nominal paradigms, the ‘externalization of inflection’ in pronouns and ‘product-oriented modifications’ in verbal conjugation, actually operate on the basis of proportional analogy. The widespread belief that assumed ‘superstable markers’ can be transferred from one inflectional type to another without a proportional base is founded on an unnecessary modification of the notion of proportional analogy that can be shown to be highly problematic by adducing empirical evidence. The most prominent instances of ‘superstable marker’ transfer in the North Germanic noun inflection are in fact clearly based on proportional relations between the inflectional patterns involved as soon as the chronology of the development is taken into consideration. It can also be shown that the shape of the ‘externalized’ inflection forms in pronominal paradigms of Old Norse cannot be accounted for by means of analogical extension but that, again, only proportional analogy provides a sufficient explanation for the attested structures. In addition, it can be demonstrated that proportional analogy offers an explanation for a similar development in Georgian. The often-supposed cases of ‘product oriented modifications’ without proportional analogy in the history of English verb inflection can be explained differently with the help of dialectal variation. Hence, they are not a counterargument against the notion of proportional analogy as the only empirically supported operational principle of analogical change in inflectional paradigms, argued for in this paper.

Several East and South Cushitic languages of East Africa have a preverbal series of subject markers. They are generally clitics, sometimes phonologically independent words. Like the subject clitics of many Romance varieties, these markers display characteristic restrictions: their paradigm is often incomplete, or the same morpheme may be shared by two or more persons. In this article, the subject markers of Cushitic are first compared with the Romance subject clitics, and then analyzed in the light of the feature geometry of pronominal systems (Harley & Ritter 2002b). It is argued that feature-geometric accounts are amenable to a diachronic interpretation, and that subject markers, rather than deriving directly from independent personal pronouns, arise out of the piecemeal addition of pronominal features from a minimal system. In so doing, they move along a possibly universal path of development, whose different stages are neatly exemplified in Cushitic.