Diachronica - Volume 31, Issue 1, 2014

We demonstrate that Old Italian had a three-gender system within which the neuter still qualified as a fully fledged gender value. To substantiate this claim, we adduce evidence showing that (a) Old Italian had three distinct sets of controllers, each of which selected a separate agreement pattern; (b) to each one of those three controller sets, including the neuter, nouns were assigned belonging to different productive inflectional classes and (c) the neuter still selected at least one dedicated agreement formative, thereby still displaying traces of its original status as a target gender. This novel evidence from Old Italian squares well with what is known about past stages of other Romance varieties. Also, we briefly address the consequences of our results both for a reconstruction of the Latin-Romance transition and, more broadly, for the theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the diachronic development of gender systems.

One Pontic Greek variety, Romeyka of Of, Turkey, today preserves a robust infinitive usage. Comparing the current infinitival distribution in Romeyka with previous stages of Greek, I argue that: (a) the Romeyka infinitive has roots in Ancient Greek due to preservation of the construction prin “before” with infinitive, which remains extremely productive, but which did not survive in other varieties into early medieval times and is only found as a learned construction in ‘high’ registers of the Medieval Greek record; (b) neither the survival of the plain and personal infinitive, nor the emergence of the inflected one can be due to contact with Turkish; (c) the Romeyka infinitive, part of a conservative medieval variety with Hellenistic features, once cut off from other medieval varieties (as early as the 11th c. ce and as late as the 16th c. ce), was reanalyzed as a negative polarity item. Such reanalysis feeds into the discussion that NPIs belong to various syntactic categories, such as nominal NPIs, NPI adverbs, NPI verbs, NPI focus particles, minimizers and now an infinitive, too.

It is often claimed in contact linguistics that core vocabulary is highly resistant to borrowing. If we want to test that claim in a quantitative way, we need both a quantitative measure of coreness and a method for quantifying borrowability. We suggest here a usage-based operationalization of coreness in terms of entrenchment, and of borrowability in terms of onomasiological success. Applying these measures in a corpus-based study on the use of English person reference nouns in Dutch, we show via a multivariate statistical analysis that there are indeed clear indications of an inversely proportional relationship between the success of the English nouns and the degree of coreness/entrenchment of the concept lexicalized by the loanwords.

The study of replica grammaticalisation in contact (Heine & Kuteva 2003, 2005) has not been without its critics (e.g. Matthews & Yip 2009, Gast & van der Auwera 2012) because of assumptions of a historical linguistic awareness of model language grammaticalisation routes. In Heine & Kuteva’s studies, the contact model language was usually understood to be a substrate or L1. The present study investigates a universal feature of New English dialects and proposes instead a replication of earlier diachronic stages in the lexifier attested up to 1000 years ago. Replication is assisted by the identification and exploitation of extant, lexical source meanings or earlier grammaticalisation stages co-existing with the grammaticalised item in the lexifier, in a situation of contact layering.