Diachronica - Volume 34, Issue 4, 2017

This paper examines the relationship between middle and passive voice constructions in Korean, in particular how they have come to share the same grammatical marker -eci. Based on diachronic data from the UNICONC (Korean historical) database, spanning Old, Middle and Modern Korean (15th to 20th century), our analysis reveals that -eci was initially used as a middle voice marker for spontaneous and inchoative events, with change-of-state as their common feature, then extended to transitive contexts, giving rise to passive voice usage. More recently, -eci has developed into a marker of facilitative middle constructions as well. These semantic extensions involve shifts in aspectual focus from change-of-state to resultative-state, and further to potential aspect and mood. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the diachrony of voice markers beyond the causative-to-passive pathway commonly seen in Northeast Asia to include the middle-to-passive pathway, with typological implications.

Evaluation of hypotheses on genetic relationships depends on two factors: database size and criteria on correspondence quality. For hypotheses on remote relationships, databases are often small. Therefore, detailed consideration of criteria on correspondence quality is important. Hypotheses on remote relationships commonly involve greater geographical and temporal ranges. Consequently, we propose that there are two factors which are likely to play a greater role in comparing hypotheses of chance, contact and inheritance for remote relationships: (i) spatial distribution of corresponding forms; and (ii) language specific unpredictability in related paradigms. Concentrated spatial distributions disfavour hypotheses of chance, and discontinuous distributions disfavour contact hypotheses, whereas hypotheses of inheritance may accommodate both. Higher levels of language-specific unpredictability favour remote over recent transmission. We consider a remote relationship hypothesis, the Proto-Australian hypothesis. We take noun class prefixation as a test dataset for evaluating this hypothesis against these two criteria, and we show that inheritance is favoured over chance and contact.

Auxiliary verbs are known to grammaticalize from lexical verbs, but how do lexical verbs acquire verbal complements to begin with? This article provides an account of the semantic and pragmatic basis of grammaticalization of the Spanish anterior (‘perfect’) [acabar + de + infinitive] from a lexical source construction meaning finish. Based on a description of finish in terms of its qualia structure, we argue that verbs meaning finish are lexically unsaturated, with an event variable that must be assigned a value, whether implicitly by inference or explicitly by a verbal complement. We show on the basis of historical corpus data from the 13th–18th centuries that overt lexical verb complements are initially motivated by informativity: the infinitive is used to describe the event when the type of event is unexpected. However, this original constructional meaning is eventually lost due to the process of overtification, which has not been discussed in the literature on language change. Writers started using the infinitive in contexts in which the finished event is not unexpected. The subsequent development of the temporal meaning is motivated by the failure of listeners to accommodate too-costly presuppositions in a particular syntactic context, leading to the reanalysis of the constructional meaning. Consequently, overtification was a necessary condition for the subsequent temporalization of the construction. These findings shed light on possible reasons for the grammaticalization of auxiliary verb constructions, at both early and later stages in their developmental histories.