Diachronica - Current Issue

El muysca pertenece a la familia lingüística chibcha y aunque se clasifica como una lengua no hablada, préstamos léxicos con su origen sobreviven en el español de Colombia. Aquí se muestran algunos de estos que se identificaron como tales al implementar el método comparativo. Los préstamos determinados bajo este método se tomaron de Giraldo Gallego (2015). Se concluye que (a) el método comparativo es útil para determinar préstamos de lenguas indígenas no habladas en el español, como ocurre con el muysca; (b) la comparación con lenguas no habladas favorece la propuesta de cognados de lenguas habladas, como acontece con el tunebo; (c) la propuesta de cognados permite la identificación de rasgos fonéticos-fonológicos, como en el caso de un posible segmento lateral alveolar aproximante para el muysca (Giraldo Gallego 2016a); y, además, (d) ayuda en la reconstrucción de étimos en una protolengua como se evidencia con el protochibcha.

The quotative system is a highly dynamic domain characterised by competing traditional variants (say, think) and newcomers (be all, be like) (Buchstaller 2013). Trend and apparent time studies have focused on be like, describing its expansion across the English-speaking world and reporting incrementation amongst the younger age-brackets (D’Arcy & Tagliamonte 2003; Gardner et al. 2021). “Information on speakers’ loyalty to be like across their lifespan is conflicting”, however (Buchstaller 2015: 460). We report on a dynamic panel corpus to assess malleability in the quotative system across the adult lifespan. Our findings suggest that the grammar underlying be like remains largely stable across the lifespan. And while most socio-demographic factors do not significantly influence speakers’ quotative choices, we seem to witness the development of socially niched retrenchment in the middle age brackets, turning one of the most vibrant changes in the English language into a gender-differentiated and age-graded pattern.

The verb second word order (V2) is known to have been present in some Medieval Romance languages, and to have been lost. The loss is however a gradual process that we propose to relate to the decreasing height of the verb movement in the left periphery through the Medieval period: whereas in the initial period the verb could move to a high position (CP Topic/Focus projection), in the final period only lower peripheral positions are accessible. This means that the ongoing change will make visible constructions involving verb movement to a lower position. Such constructions are studied here in parallel texts calibrated for provenance and text type from two Romance languages for the period from the beginning of the 14th century to the 16th century. More specifically, we investigate Participle and Infinitive Fronting in French and Venetian, showing that these structures involve low movement and correlate with a V2 of the low type.

Models of higher-order Austronesian linguistic relations have traditionally involved the grouping of languages into large higher-order subgroups. In the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup, that tradition has led to the creation of subgroups covering great geographical distances all modeled as descending directly from the Malayo-Polynesian node. This research argues that the evidence for those large subgroups does not stand under scrutiny. Rather, the distribution of innovations throughout the Malayo-Polynesian region suggests that those innovations spread within a large network of dialects. That network, here dubbed the “Late-Malayo-Polynesian” network, replaces discrete higher-level nodes in the classical model of Austronesian linguistic relations.

William (Bill) Labov, pioneering scholar of language change, died on December 17, 2024. His MA and PhD theses in the mid 1960s revolutionized the field of language variation and change, and he spent the subsequent 60 years building on that foundation. This is a memoriam written by one of his final PhD students. This piece has two aims. The first is to invite you, the reader, into the feeling of being in Bill’s orbit. My hope is that by the end of it, you feel the same sort of love for him that many of us do. And the second is to convince you of my main thesis: that what is now understood as Bill’s genius could not have taken place without his preexisting love of humanity.