Diachronica - Volume 31, Issue 4, 2014

This paper examines cyclical changes in comparative subclauses, showing how operators are reanalysed as complementisers via the general mechanism of the relative cycle, and how this is related to whether certain lexical elements have to be deleted at the left periphery. I also show that only operators appearing without a lexical XP can be grammaticalised, which follows from the nature of the formal features associated with the various operator elements. Though the main focus is on Hungarian historical data, the framework can be applied to other languages too, such as German and Italian, since the changes stem from general principles of economy.

The present study aims to investigate the opposing tendencies of innovation and conservatism in the phonetic and phonological domains in Arabic. It draws a parallel between sound changes that occurred in the standard variety and the retention of specific phonetic and phonological aspects in the dialectal varieties. Recent works have highlighted three bases of sound change: phonetic, structural and social causes. The phonetic basis of sound change has been challenged from an articulatory, acoustic, aerodynamic and perceptual point of view, but also from a coarticulatory one as is illustrated here by the evolution of the phonetic properties of classical Arabic’s four consonants (〈sīn〉 (س) /s/, 〈šīn〉 (ش) /ʃ/, 〈ḍād〉 (ض) /dʕ/ and 〈ğīm〉 (ج) /ʒ/). Other coarticulatory bases are proposed to explain the retention of some old phonetic and phonological traits in modern Arabic dialects, such as the preservation of the long mid vowels ē /eː/ and ō /oː/, the evolution of the interdental fricative consonants 〈z̩ā’〉 /ðʕ/, 〈thā’〉 /θ/ and 〈dhal〉 /ð/ and the uvular stop 〈qāf〉 /q/ and the tendency to depharyngealise the consonants 〈ṭā’〉 (ط) /tʕ/, 〈ḍād〉 (ض) /dʕ/, 〈s̩ād〉 (ص) /sʕ/ and 〈z̩ā’〉 (ظ) /ðʕ/.

The person-oriented nature of a demonstrative system can be marked explicitly by incorporating person markers into demonstratives. When these distinguish gender or number, this can lead to an unusual type of allocutivity: addressee agreement on medials. The latter development is cross-linguistically rarely reported, but is attested in Siwi Berber, Quranic and Rāziħ Arabic and arguably Imperial Aramaic. Examination of these and other languages shows a pathway whereby demonstrative systems gain addressee-anchored terms through grammaticalisation of a phrase including an oblique second person pronoun, occasionally producing addressee agreement. The semantic properties of allocutivity help explain the rarity of the latter result.