Diachronica - Online First

The study of language change in American Sign Language (ASL) has been constrained by a limited historical record. Here we present five case studies that demonstrate how applying a broad set of historical methods, together with the consultation of underutilized sources of sign data, can shed new light on ASL in the 19th century. These case studies cover aspects of two subsystems of ASL, (i) the fingerspelling alphabet and (ii) the numeral system, as well as (iii) the etymologies of selected initialized signs, (iv) the innovation of superordinate terms, and (v) phonological variation in the mano cornuta, or horns, handshape. We argue that these case studies reveal two broad drivers of change in the history of ASL. Bottom-up changes, often driven by biomechanical or perceptual factors, originated within the ASL signing community, likely without signers’ conscious awareness. Top-down, or prescriptive, changes were effective in the early years of ASL, when the signing community was small and still tightly linked to schools for the deaf where these changes were instituted and where they first spread.

By the late Middle Ages, a part of South Slavic, including Macedonian and Bulgarian, had lost nominal case inflection, leading to the disappearance of the old Slavic differential object marking (DOM) system. In the 19th century, some southern Macedonian dialects developed a new DOM system based on the preposition na ‘on, to’. This study explores the evolution of this DOM system by comparing Southern Macedonian texts from two periods — the mid-19th century and mid-20th century. The main factors conditioning DOM include animacy (humanness), definiteness, and the lexical class of the verb. We observe a general increase in the na-marking and a shift from optionality toward automatization. In early texts, the na-marking sporadically occurs with pronouns and definite human-referring nouns. In later texts, pronouns and human proper names are almost always marked, whereas marking of definite human-referring common nouns remains optional, albeit with increasing frequency over time. We also report negative evidence for other factors frequently mentioned in typological works on DOM, such as the disambiguating function of case within the global discourse context. Notably, this factor does not emerge as significant in Macedonian.

This paper analyzes how the grammatical meaning of qualitative evaluation is developed in optatives which denote blessings and curses. Based on the analysis of several Turkic forms and several Russian constructions, this study distinguishes the grammatical meaning of evaluation from a pragmatic implication arising in particular contexts. It shows that grammatical items that have evaluative usages often exhibit a certain “fluidity”, with positive or negative interpretation specified by the context. Positive or negative evaluation comes as a pragmatic satellite, and even if the category generally leans towards a negative (or positive) interpretation, it can in certain contexts display the opposite evaluation. Based on this approach, the paper suggests two different paths of the development of grammatical markers which denote qualitative evaluation.