Diachronica - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2012

In the absence of comparative method reconstruction, high rate of lexical cognate candidates is often used as evidence for relationships between languages. This paper uses the Oswalt Monte Carlo Shift test (a variant of Oswalt 1970) to explore the statistical basis of the claim that the four Papuan languages of the Solomon Islands have greater than chance levels of lexical similarity. The results of this test initially appear to show that the lexical similarities between the Central Solomons Papuan languages are statistically significant, but the effect disappears when known Oceanic loanwords are removed. The Oswalt Monte Carlo test is a useful technique to test a claim of greater than chance similarity between any two word lists — with the proviso that undetected loanwords strongly increase the chance of spurious identification.

The dative reanalysis ‘origins’ explanation for prenominal periphrastic possessive constructions (PPPCs) in Dutch has been maintained for well over a century. This paper brings new evidence to bear on this hypothesis, arguing that while genitive relational case marking on the possessor NP in earlier Dutch PPPCs is clearly attested, we lack evidence that the dative was used in this way. Instead, two types of case marking strategies are in use in earlier Dutch PPPCs — one relational and one concordial — as a solution to case conflict in instances which would otherwise give rise to double case marking. Historical and present-day dialect data from German is also examined to address the common assumption that developments in Dutch PPPCs mirrored those in German. Similar to Dutch, clear evidence attests to genitive relational case marking in earlier German PPPCs.

The paper provides a structured account of the evolution of the Romance pronominal/adnominal demonstrative systems, using both the analysis of medieval corpora and recent fieldwork. It identifies the mechanisms involved, building on a detailed analysis of the textual and extra-textual usage of demonstratives, which gives new insight into the nature of deixis and anaphora. The evidence shows that the genetic relation between deictics and anaphorics is not unidirectional: not only can anaphors originate from deictics, the reverse can also be shown to hold true, with pure anaphorics appearing to be a viable source for second-person deictics. The main driving force in the process is subjectification, which conditions the development at every stage. The evolution follows predictable pathways and turns out to be cyclic: three main recurrent patterns are clearly identifiable for all the varieties investigated.

For a century, Old Frisian has largely remained in the shadows of its Germanic sister languages. While dictionaries, concordances, and grammars have been readily and widely available for learning and researching other Germanic languages such as Middle High German, Middle Low German and Middle English, whose timelines roughly correspond to that of Old Frisian, or their earlier counterparts, e.g., Old High German, Old Saxon and Old English, few materials have been available to scholars of Old Frisian. Moreover, as Siebunga (Boutkan & Siebunga 2005: vii) notes, “not even all Old Frisian manuscripts are available as text editions”1 making the production of comprehensive core research materials more difficult. Consequently, what materials there have been, e.g., von Richthofen (1840), Heuser (1903), Holthausen (1925), and Sjölin (1969), have typically not taken into consideration the full range of extant Old Frisian texts, or have focused on specific major dialects, e.g. Boutkan (1996), Buma (1954, 1961). This has left a gap in the materials available providing an opportunity for Old Frisian scholars to make substantial contributions to the field by filling these gaps.