Diachronica - Current Issue

Using the Northern Samoyedic languages, Uralic languages spoken by nomads of Northern Siberia, we propose a new method to reconstruct histories of related languages in contact. The method consists of clustering languages by sets of shared innovations which happened after the breakup of their common proto-language. A discrepancy in how dozens of phonological and morphological innovations are distributed by sets of Northern Samoyedic languages is striking: we suggest this discrepancy points to social rearrangements of the past. The phonological changes predominantly join the sets of languages that were in contact long ago, while morphological patterns also spread across those languages which were spoken nearer each other more recently. We identify the sociolinguistic ecology of the nomadic communities as a driving force for the intermittent wave-like spread of innovations. Previous research on the phonological innovations of Northern Samoyedic is concisely synthesised, while the morphological innovations are presented in full for the first time.

Assimilatory processes are generally understood to rely on sequential structure: a target element adopts features of a preceding or following element. While signed languages arguably show less sequential structure than spoken languages, there are several areas of the grammar of signed languages where sequential structure is evident and the conditions for assimilatory processes are available. Previous work has explored coarticulatory effects in sign production and has identified assimilation in contexts of multimorphemic compounds. This paper extends the investigation of diachronic assimilation to sign-internal assimilation within monomorphemic signs. We present case studies of diachronic assimilation using historical documentation of American Sign Language as well as comparative data from across the so-called French sign language family. We argue that although opportunities for sequentially structured assimilation in signed languages may be significantly fewer than in spoken languages, nevertheless many of the same kinds of assimilatory processes can be seen in diachronic changes to signs.

Yiddish, once spoken by millions, is now maintained primarily within Hasidic communities in urban centers like New York. While recent scholarship emphasizes innovation in Hasidic Yiddish (HY), verifying change is challenging due to limited documentation of source dialects from the Carpathian region, the historical Unterland. This study examines a previously undocumented HY feature: phonetic reduction of the separable prefix tsuzamen ‘together’ to tsam, syntactic split from the adverbial form, and semantic extension to verbal intensifier. Study 1 analyzes prewar Yiddish variants using the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe, revealing tsam to be a feature of Unterland Yiddish. Study 2 documents contemporary usage through interviews with fifty HY speakers, showing near-consistent use of tsam as a prefix. Thus, while the morpheme itself is shown to be a retention from prewar Yiddish, its standardization constitutes an innovation. The shift towards a more focused variety is attributed to historical and sociolinguistic factors, particularly the influence of the Satmar Hasidic community in New York.

This paper addresses the question to what extent the large influx of French verbs effected structural changes in the expression of resultativity in earlier English. Early French and English use distinctly different lexicalization patterns to encode motion and change-of-state events. In terms of Talmy’s (2000) typology, early English is a typical satellite-framing language, encoding Result outside the verb in a satellite, while French is a verb-framing language, encoding Result in the verb. A comprehensive corpus study of the lexical semantics of verbs occurring in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English reveals that French verbs establish a novel way of expressing Result: transitive state-incorporating verbs are introduced in Middle English and witness a consistent diachronic increase after that. Complementary distribution effects with satellite-framing constructions suggest that these verbs are copied with their featural properties in the mental lexicon, which we interpret in terms of Ramchand’s (2008) First Phase Syntax.