Diachronica - Volume 24, Issue 2, 2007

This paper seeks to shed light on the diachronic evolution of collocations by examining structures formed in Modern Spanish with dar “give” plus state nouns (e.g. dar miedo “frighten”, literally, “give fear”). Using the Corpus del español, I offer a quantitative and qualitative analysis of eighteen representative dar miedo-type collocations from the 1200s to the 1900s. The results show that although the basic properties of dar miedo-type structures have remained remarkably stable over the centuries, during the Middle Ages the verb hacer “make” was used here almost as often as dar — a competition apparently inherited from Latin. While different nouns show different patterns of loss of hacer, echoing the lexical diffusion of certain grammatical changes, the 1500s saw a very sharp decline in “make” cases across the board, leading to its complete disappearance from this context by the 1800s. The loss of hacer led to a radical simplification of the collocational properties of state nouns in Spanish vis-à-vis Latin and other Modern Romance varieties. This process resulted both from language-internal factors mostly related to the lexical semantics of dar and hacer and from three key sociolinguistic processes in 16th-century Spanish: koineization, change of norm and increased standardization.

Bergin’s Rule constructions, whereby verbs in Old Irish occur in other than normal clause-initial position and with ‘conjunct’ flexion in simplex verbs and ‘prototonic’ stress in compound verbs, has traditionally been viewed as evidence for the language’s prehistoric clausal configuration, usually considered to be SOV or, more recently, V2. Others view the construction as entirely artificial, i.e., as not reflecting any historical reality, perhaps based on Latin models. This paper demonstrates that the difficult evidence emphatically does not support a V2 analysis, but is otherwise indeterminate. The conjunct flexion of simplex verbs and the prototonic stress of compound verbs used in the construction is also diagnostic of the fact that it is not simply the result of scrambling the normal VSO clausal configuration of Old Irish, but represents vestiges of real syntax.

The status of Gullah and Bahamian Creole English (BahCE) within the Atlantic English creoles and their historical relationship with African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have long been a matter of discussion. It was assumed that Gullah and BahCE are ‘sister’ varieties sharing an immediate ancestor in the eighteenth-century creole English spoken on plantations in the American South. We present historical and linguistic data, including a statistical analysis of 253 phonological, lexical, and grammatical features found in eight Atlantic English creoles, to show that Gullah and BahCE are indeed closely related — so closely in fact that BahCE must be considered a ‘diaspora variety’ not of AAVE but of Gullah.

It is commonly claimed that in English adjectives denoting colour and other physical properties, referred to here as ‘appearance/attribute’ adjectives, do not give rise to adverbs. This alleged constraint has been related to the fact that the adjectives in question are stative. In this paper I present data which show that appearance/attribute adjectives do give rise to adverbs. To be sure, such ‘appearance/attribute adverbs’ are infrequent and ‘literary’, but they began to be used to some extent in the 19th century, and their frequency has increased considerably during the last two centuries. In fact, in contexts where both adjectives and adverbs are allowed, i.e. in collocation with verbs that do not subcategorize for an adjective or adverb, adverbs have become more frequent than adjectives. This paper discusses what brought about this change, arguing that the crucial mechanism is analogy, and that conditioning factors are the argument structure of the relevant adverbs, the dynamicity of the collocating verb, positional distribution, creativity, and the existence of the same adverb forms with metaphorical meanings. I also argue that the development of appearance/attribute adverbs must be seen in relation to the so called ‘adverbialization process’ which has been sweeping the English language for at least a millennium.

Several databases have been compiled with the aim of documenting the distribution of typological features across the world’s languages. This paper looks at ways of utilizing this type of data for making inferences concerning genealogical relationships by using phylogenetic algorithms originally developed for biologists. The focus is on methodology, including how to assess the stability of individual typological features and the suitability of different phylogenetic algorithms, as well as ways to enhance phylogenetic signals and heuristic procedures for identifying genealogical relationships. The various issues are illustrated by a small sample of empirical data from a set of Native American languages.