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- Volume 35, Issue 3, 2018
Diachronica - Volume 35, Issue 3, 2018
Volume 35, Issue 3, 2018
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Split coordination in English
Author(s): Ann Taylor and Susan Pintzukpp.: 310–337 (28)More LessAbstractIn this article we provide a practical demonstration of how syntactically annotated corpora (treebanks), particularly the English Historical Parsed Corpora Series, can be used to investigate research questions with a diachronic depth and synchronic breadth that would not otherwise be possible. The phenomenon under investigation is split coordination, in which two parts of a conjoined constituent appear separated in the clause (e.g., and this is where my aunt lives and my uncle). It affects every type of coordinated constituent (subject/object DPs, predicate and attributive ADJPs, ADVPs, PPs and DP objects of P) in Old English (OE); and it, or a superficially similar construction, occurs continuously throughout the attested period from approximately 800 to the present day. Despite its synchronic range and diachronic persistence, split coordination has received surprisingly little attention in the diachronic literature, with the exception of Perez Lorido’s (2009) limited study of split subjects in eight OE texts. Its modern counterpart is most frequently analysed as Bare Argument Ellipsis (BAE). Although the OE and Present-Day English constructions appear superficially similar, we show that not all of the OE data is amenable to a BAE analysis. We bring to bear different types of evidence (structural, discourse/performance effects, rate of change, etc.) to argue that split coordination in fact represents two different constructions, one of which remains stable over time while the other is lost in the post-Middle English period.
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A corpus approach to the history of Russian po delimitatives
Author(s): Hanne Martine Eckhoffpp.: 338–366 (29)More LessAbstractThis paper illustrates how enriched diachronic treebank data can shed new light on an old and vexed topic, even when that topic is primarily morphological and semantic in nature rather than syntactic. The topic is the rise of the Russian po delimitatives, a change seen as crucial in most accounts of the history of Russian aspect, since it represents a major step in generalising the derivational aspect system. Earlier accounts concur that the po delimitatives spread fairly recently, too recently for the development to be connected to the loss of the aorist tense, which also had delimitative readings with atelic verbs. Using treebank data from the Tromsø Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic Treebank, enriched with tags for derivational morphology and semantics, I show that the po delimitatives were not marginal even in the earliest Slavic sources, either in terms of frequency or semantics, and that they first complemented and then competed with the delimitative aorists. It can thus be claimed that the exotic po delimitatives grew organically out of the old Indo-European inflectional aspect system.
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Non-configurationality in diachrony
Author(s): Edoardo Maria Ponti and Silvia Luraghipp.: 367–392 (26)More LessAbstractNon-configurationality is a linguistic property associated with free word order, discontinuous constituents, including NPs, and null anaphora of referential arguments. Quantitative metrics, based both on local networks (syntactic trees and word order within sentences) and on global networks (incorporating the relations within a whole treebank into a shared graph), can reveal correlations among these features. Using treebanks we focus on diachronic varieties of Ancient Greek and Latin, in which non-configurationality tapered off over time, leading to the largely configurational nature of the Romance languages and of Modern Greek. A property of global networks (density of their spectra around zero eigenvalues) measuring the regularity in word order is shown to be strengthened from classical to late varieties. Discontinuous NPs are traced by counting the words creating non-projectivity in dependency trees: these drop dramatically in late varieties. Finally, developments in the use of null referential direct objects are gauged by assessing the percentage of third-person personal pronouns among verb objects. All three features turn out to change over time due to the decay of non-configurationality. Evaluation of the strength of their pairwise correlation shows that null direct objects and discontinuous NPs are deeply intertwined.
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Text form and grammatical changes in Medieval French
Author(s): Alexandra Simonenko, Benoît Crabbé and Sophie Prévostpp.: 393–428 (36)More LessAbstractThis paper presents a treebank-based study of the effect the text form (prose vs. verse) has on the course of two grammatical changes in Medieval French: the loss of null subjects and the loss of OV word order. By means of statistical analysis, we demonstrate that naive estimates of the spread of overt subjects and VO orders give the impression that there is a significant difference between the rates of development in prose vs. verse. By contrast, estimates based on an abstract grammar competition model which distinguishes between grammar-ambiguous surface forms (overt personal subjects, null subjects in coordination contexts) and grammar-unambiguous surface forms (overt expletive subjects, null subjects in non-coordination contexts) show prose-verse parallelism, prose having an earlier change onset, in line with traditional intuitions. At a more general level, these results suggest that the product of the interaction of a particular grammar with universal pragmatic laws is constant, which can be observed if the factors responsible for variation in grammatical choices are controlled for.
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Spoken Latin behind written texts
Author(s): Timo Korkiakangaspp.: 429–449 (21)More LessAbstractThis study uses treebanking to investigate how spoken language infiltrated legal Latin in early medieval Italy. The documents used are always formulaic, but they also always contain a ‘free’ part where the case in question is described in free prose. This paper uses this difference to measure how ten linguistic features, representative of the evolution that took place between Classical and Late Latin, are distributed between the formulaic and free parts. Some variants are attested equally often in both parts of the documents, while perceptually or conceptually salient variants appear to be preserved in their conservative form mainly in the formulaic parts.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 41 (2024)
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Volume 40 (2023)
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Volume 39 (2022)
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Volume 38 (2021)
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Volume 37 (2020)
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Volume 36 (2019)
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Volume 35 (2018)
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Volume 34 (2017)
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Volume 33 (2016)
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Volume 32 (2015)
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Volume 31 (2014)
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Volume 30 (2013)
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Volume 29 (2012)
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Volume 28 (2011)
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Volume 27 (2010)
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Volume 26 (2009)
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Volume 25 (2008)
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Volume 24 (2007)
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Volume 23 (2006)
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Volume 22 (2005)
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Volume 21 (2004)
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Volume 20 (2003)
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Volume 19 (2002)
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Volume 18 (2001)
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Volume 17 (2000)
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Volume 16 (1999)
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Volume 15 (1998)
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Volume 14 (1997)
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Volume 13 (1996)
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Volume 12 (1995)
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Volume 11 (1994)
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Volume 10 (1993)
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Volume 9 (1992)
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Volume 8 (1991)
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Volume 7 (1990)
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Volume 6 (1989)
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Volume 5 (1988)
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Volume 4 (1987)
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Volume 3 (1986)
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Volume 2 (1985)
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Volume 1 (1984)
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What happened to English?
Author(s): John McWhorter
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