Diachronica - Volume 31, Issue 2, 2014

This article investigates lexical expansion in the HAVE and BE perfect in Dutch. It is known from previous research that early perfects show more lexical restrictions than their modern counterparts. The aim of this article is to uncover how perfects change their collocational preferences over time. The present study tackles this issue taking a quantitative corpus perspective. The empirical basis for this study is a sample of HAVE and BE perfects taken from a corpus of Dutch legal texts (1250–1800). The sample is analyzed using the method of diachronic distinctive collexeme analysis. The statistical analysis indicates that both perfect constructions show fine-grained shifts in collocational preferences over time. The observed lexical expansion has the following properties: it proceeds (a) gradually, (b) through semantically related verb classes, (c) away from a prototype. These properties are accounted for making use of insights from prototype theory and construction grammar.

A number of consonant shifts in the history of Athabaskan languages are considered. The goal is to better explain examples of ‘auditorily based substitution’ by invoking ‘phonetic features’ as is required by the sound change theory of Blevins (2004). We argue that the shifts are better understood as instances of Blevins’s change process involving the phonetic features ⟦grave⟧ and ⟦flat⟧. These features are defined acoustically in accord with recent phonetic studies of obstruents. It is crucial that these and other phonetic features are scalar-valued, and thus are part of a phonetics-phonology interface component which is separate from the distinctive phonological feature system.

Westphalian German Spirantization refers to the change from an original prevocalic long vowel to the corresponding short vowel plus fricative (i.e. [ɣ]). For example, the [ɪɣ] sequence in the Westphalian word [klɪɣə] “bran” derived historically from [iː]. The present article offers a new treatment for the historical shift from [iː] to [ɪɣ] — as well as similar ones involving other vowels — which breaks the process down into five separate changes. It is argued that each of these changes modified non-linear representations involving syllables, moras and segmental features. A crucial component of the proposed analysis is that each of the five changes is seen as a repair to a constraint.