Diachronica - Volume 32, Issue 2, 2015

In this article we reconstruct the actuation and transmission of a phonological innovation known as prefix reduction within the Kikongo language cluster situated in the wider Lower Congo region of Central Africa. We argue that this change spread from a focal area coinciding with the heartland of the Kongo kingdom as a classical process of dialectal diffusion. Thanks to a unique Kikongo corpus that starts in the 17th century, we can provide diachronic empirical evidence for different phases of the process, which has been otherwise difficult, if not impossible, in Bantu historical linguistics. What is more, and also quite exceptional in African linguistics, we have fairly good insight into the ‘social ecology’ of this language change and argue that political centralization and economic integration within the realm of the Kongo kingdom facilitated such a contact-induced diffusion between closely-related language varieties.

In this article we focus on one grammaticalization path to perfective markers, that of the so-called ‘bounder perfectives’ (Bybee & Dahl 1989). Systems with these kinds of perfective markers – often called ‘Slavic-style aspect’ – are particularly elaborated in the Slavic languages. To examine why this is the case, we study the long-disputed question of the semantic relationship between the inflectional aspectual system inherited from PIE and the emerging affixation-based verb pair system in expressing aspect in Old Church Slavonic (OCS), using parallel Greek and OCS data from the PROIEL corpus. Previous researchers have made extremely conflicting claims about this relationship, some seeing the inflectional system as the main exponent of aspect, others seeing the affixation system as the main exponent of aspect. Our statistical study of the data shows rather that the OCS system attests an interesting language stage where there are two partially overlapping exponents of aspect. By firmly establishing the facts of the synchronic OCS system, we can look both backwards and forwards. We argue that Slavic ‘bounder perfectives’ owe their advanced development to their coexistence with the old inflectional aspect system. We also argue that the well-known interactions between the two aspectual systems in Bulgarian, which still retains both, are probably a later development.

The production of a contour tone requires a longer duration than the production of a level tone. This paper demonstrates that this durational relationship becomes considerably more complex when tones are realized on bimoraic sonorant units that can support both level tones and contour tones. Evidence comes from diachronic processes in which pitch and duration interact. In languages where (intrinsic) durational differences between two groups of bimoraic units lead to tonal contrasts, the longer units commonly receive a contour tone, and the shorter ones a level tone; yet over time, the units with the fully developed contour tone tend to shorten, and those with the level tone tend to lengthen. Ultimately, this can even lead to durational reversals between the units in question. The discussion focuses primarily on Franconian tone accent dialects but also incorporates data from Estonian, Hup, Las Norias Piman and North Low Saxon.