Diachronica - Volume 27, Issue 3, 2010

This paper examines the development of a future (more precisely ‘prospective’) auxiliary from a motion verb in a small group of Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken in Iraq. The long written record of Aramaic allows us to follow the grammaticalization process in some detail, and recent documentation of dialects has shown that various stages co-exist synchronically. The Neo-Aramaic case challenges the theory that future auxiliaries from a verb ‘to go’ should derive from an imperfective in languages which have one. The development of the auxiliary also involves the reanalysis of a present perfect as an immediate future: this apparently surprising development is explained and possible parallels to it in other languages given. The prospective construction exists alongside another future tense and the differences in form and function can be seen to reflect the different origins and ages of the two constructions. There are strong indications that the prospective construction has developed as a result of contact with a similar vernacular Arabic construction. The distribution and level of maturity of the construction in the different dialects can be explained by an origin in a village close to the Arabic-speaking area, and thence diffusion to the neighbouring villages.

This paper deals with one of the oldest and most controversial problems in the historical morphology of the Germanic branch of Indo-European: the origin and historical development of the so-called ‘weak preterite’. In Germanic, the weak preterite is the only means of forming the preterite tense of a derived verb. In spite of two hundred years of research into the weak preterite and a large number of hypotheses concerning its origin, it is not even securely established how the inflectional endings of this formation should be reconstructed for the common prehistory of the attested Germanic languages. Traditionally the inflectional endings of the weak preterite are conceived of as reflecting free inflectional forms of the verb “do”, only recently having been grammaticalized as inflectional morphology for derived verbs. But it has never been possible to identify the inflectional forms in question satisfactorily within the paradigm of “do”. This paper reconsiders the evidence of the Germanic daughter languages by taking into account West Germanic irregularities previously neglected or viewed as irrelevant. It is shown that the West Germanic evidence provides a key to understanding the origin and the later developments of the weak preterite inflectional endings.

In the typology of morphological borrowing, one type has received little attention: cases where words are borrowed in several paradigmatic forms. An example of this is found in English alumnus – alumni, where Latin nouns are borrowed both in their singular and plural forms. Such borrowings lead to a coexistence of borrowed and native paradigms in one and the same language. This type of borrowing is called Parallel System Borrowing (PSB). Such patterns are wide-spread, and concern virtually all parts of morphology, including verbal inflection and pronouns. The emergence of PSB is not governed by a single sociolinguistic factor, such as the existence of learned registers (as with alumnus – alumni). In fact, it appears that some of the most spectacular cases of PSB have no relation to learned registers at all.