Diachronica - Volume 36, Issue 4, 2019

In contrast to grammaticalization studies of lexical verbs changing into auxiliaries, the realm of semantic changes associated with lexical verbs is an understudied area of historical semantics. We concentrate on the emergence of verbs of success from more semantically concrete verbs, uncovering six conceptual metaphors which all co-occur with non-canonical encoding of subjects in Indo-European. Careful scrutiny of the relevant data reveals a semantic development most certainly inherited from Indo-European; hence, we reconstruct a dat-‘succeeds’ construction at different levels of schematicity for Proto-Indo-European, including a novel reconstruction of a conceptual metaphor, success is motion forward, and the mapping between this metaphor and the verb-class-specific argument structure construction. Hence, this article offers a systematic analysis of regularity in semantic change, highlighting the importance of predicate and argument structure for lexical semantic developments.

The concept of Gliederungsverschiebung (rebracketing) was introduced by the Neogrammarians and it is probably the first explanation of syntactic change proper. Originally, it was conceived of to explain the emergence of the complementizer dass “that”, which was held to go back to a demonstrative pronoun that refers cataphorically to a following main clause and which was eventually reanalyzed as introducing the second clause. This paper presents several examples of rebracketing (mainly from various stages of German) and argues that rebracketing is only possible if the clause whose boundary is shifted is embedded under and selected by a lexical head that is eventually reanalyzed as a complementizer. This condition on rebracketing follows from the fact that otherwise, the respective clause would be a phase and no longer accessible for operations from outside (thus excluding rebracketing). Additionally, the paper argues that rebracketing is economy-driven in that it minimizes the structure and it is motivated by the Principle of Early Merge that applies whenever no further movement follows.

This paper investigates the role of negation in grammaticalization in Iquito, an endangered Zaparoan language of the Peruvian Amazon. Iquito has a verb, pajɨɨni, which has undergone two paths of grammaticalization only in negated clauses. First, pajɨɨni has grammaticalized from “learn” to “be able to.” Subsequently, it is undergoing grammaticalization from an ability verb to a future auxiliary. Given that ability verbs are an uncommon source for future auxiliaries (Bybee et al. 1994), this study provides a detailed case study of this rare path. Our analysis of Iquito demonstrates that grammaticalization paths are not limited to affirmative contexts and may behave differently depending on the polarity of the utterance.

Based on the number of words per meaning across the Indo-European Swadesh list, Pagel et al. (2007) suggest that frequency of use is a general mechanism of linguistic evolution. We test this claim using within-language change. From the IDS (Key & Comrie 2015) we compiled a comparative word list of 1,147 cognate pairs for Classical Latin and Modern Spanish, and 1,231 cognate pairs for Classical and Modern Greek. We scored the amount of change for each cognate pair in the two language histories according to a novel 6-point scale reflecting increasing levels of change from regular sound change to external borrowing. We find a weak negative correlation between frequency of use and lexical change for both the Latin-Spanish and Classical-Modern Greek language developments, but post hoc tests reveal that low frequency of use of borrowed words drive these patterns, casting some doubt on frequency of use as a general mechanism of language change.