Diachronica - Volume 35, Issue 1, 2018

This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 Indo-European languages. We partition types of change (i.e., gain or loss) for each variant according to whether they bring about a simplification in morphosyntactic patterns that must be learned, whether they are neutral (i.e., neither simplifying nor introducing complexity) or whether they introduce a more complex pattern. We find that changes which introduce complexity show significantly less areal signal (according to a metric we devise) than changes which simplify and neutral changes, but we find no significant differences between the latter two groups. This result is compatible with a scenario where certain types of parallel change are more likely to be mediated by advergence and contact between proximate speech communities, while other developments are due purely to drift and are largely independent of intercultural contact.

This paper deals with the creation of the Old Irish oblique relative conjunct particle -(s)aN- (e.g., dianepir “for which he says” = do-(s)aN-epir) as the outcome of the internalization of a demonstrative form used as a light head, which initially stood as a morphologically independent form. The initial step of this change was the grammaticalization of that demonstrative as the oblique element of a paradigm of relative-clause type forms in which the subject and object functions of the antecedent of the relative are also distinguished. Internalization is defined as an abrupt morphological change creating grammatical elements; its specific mechanism is the mirror image of externalization and must be distinguished from other morphological changes such as incorporation.

This article addresses the diachronic development of so-called rival forms, i.e., words or grammatical constructions that appear to be synonyms, based on a detailed empirical analysis of two seemingly synonymous constructions in Russian. Corresponding to the English ‘decade construction’ in the twenties, Russian has two rival constructions, viz. v dvadcatye gody [lit. “in the twentieth years”] (with the numeral and noun in the accusative) and v dvadcatyx godax (with the numeral and noun in the locative case). Three hypotheses about rival forms are considered: leveling (whereby one form ousts its rival), sociolinguistic differentiation (whereby the two rivals survive in different varieties of a language) and semantic differentiation (whereby the two rivals develop different meanings over time). Contrary to what has been suggested in the literature, we find little evidence for semantic and sociolinguistic differentiation. Instead, we demonstrate that leveling is taking place, since the accusative construction is in the process of ousting its rival. While our study shows that corpus data facilitate detailed analysis of the interaction between leveling, sociolinguistic differentiation and semantic differentiation, our analysis also points to limitations, especially when it comes to corpus-based analysis of sociolinguistic and semantic factors.

This paper examines adverb formation with -ly, e.g., slow/slowly, and uses a large archive of synchronic dialects to uncover the current state and historical trajectory of this process. The results reveal that English adverbs are a variegated system. The intensifying adverb really is a frequent form while sentential adverbs appear to be a newer layer in the system. In contrast, manner adverbs are constrained by the semantic interpretation of the adverb as abstract or concrete. These results expose the complexity of the English adverb system and demonstrate that adverb formation is an ideal site for uncovering historical processes in synchronic data.