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Diachronica - Online First

Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume

3 results

    • Linguistic mechanisms of colour term evolution

      Available online: 27 November 2023
      Abstract

      We investigated diachrony of distributional semantics of two competing Russian colour terms (CTs) for ‘brown’, (11th century) and (17th century), using the Russian subcorpus of . Time-series analysis (1800–2019) of bigrams gauged each term’s frequencies of occurrence and changes in combinability with nouns for natural objects, artefacts, abstract concepts and figurative expressions. In frequency, overtook in the 1920s, confirming its basic status in modern Russian. The perplexity index indicates that steadily increased the range of denoted objects, with artefacts being front runners in the -to- transition. The results corroborate Rakhilina’s ( ) hypothesis that an incipient CT initially collocates with nouns denoting artefacts but gradually expands to the realm of natural objects supplanting an old CT. Moreover, and are discerned by denotations and connotations. The present findings provide insights into general mechanisms of the linguistic evolution of an emergent basic CT.

    • Realis morphology and Chatino’s role in the diversification of Zapotec languages

      Available online: 26 September 2023
      Abstract

      This paper concerns a semantic change whereby a continuous aspect prefix was reinterpreted as marking realis mood. This change took place in Chatino and then diffused to the Southern Zapotec subgroup, contributing to the genetic diversification of the Zapotec languages. Proto-Zapotecan marked irrealis mood with *k- and did not mark realis. *n- indicated continuous aspect and could concatenate with perfective *ku- to render a resultative reading. A continuous-marked positional verb *n-te later grammaticalized as a progressive prefix in Chatino. As both perfective and progressive refer to (at least partially) realized situations, *n- was reanalyzed as a marker of realis mood that could concatenate with aspectual viewpoint prefixes. The realis prefix is shown to be one of several traits diffused from Chatino which contribute to the creation of the Southern Zapotec clade and its divergence from Monte Albán Zapotec.

    • Word order evolves at similar rates in main and subordinate clauses

      Available online: 17 August 2023
      Abstract

      In syntactic change, it remains an open issue whether word orders are more conservative or innovative in subordinate clauses compared with main clauses. Using 47 dependency-annotated corpora and Bayesian phylogenetic inference, we explore the evolution of S/V, V/O, and S/O orders across main and subordinate clauses in Indo-European. Our results reveal similar rates of change across clause types, with no evidence for any inherent conservatism of subordinate or main clauses. Our models also support evolutionary biases towards SV, VO, and SO orders, consistent with theories of dependency length minimization that favor verb-medial orders and with theories of a subject preference that favor SO orders. Finally, our results show that while the word order in the proto-language cannot be estimated with any reasonable degree of certainty, the early history of the family was dominated by a moderate preference for SVO orders, with substantial uncertainty between VO and OV orders in both main and subordinate clauses.

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