Functions of Language - Volume 32, Issue 3, 2025

Abstract

Grammaticalization is often conceived of as a change from less to more grammatical, with loss of semantic content and the acquisition of a more grammatical status. However, the roles of discourse and prosody in grammaticalization processes are not often taken into consideration. This paper describes seven syntactic and two discourse functions of forms historically related to the noun meaning ‘thing’ in Sà’án Sàvǐ ñà Ñuù Xnúvíkó (Mixtepec Mixtec, Otomanguean). At the level of discourse, these forms, pervasive in unplanned speech, may function as hesitation markers and floor-keeping devices. The floor-keeping function, in turn, serves as a clause-combining device in discourse. The spoken nature of the corpus analyzed here allows us to see how information is distributed over Intonation Units (IU) and their combinations. This paper offers structural and prosodic evidence that some syntactic functions of these forms developed from discourse structures.

Abstract

This paper explores the advantages of using Latent Class Analysis (LCA) as a computational approach to mapping replacement in language change. Historical linguistics assumes that when a construction replaces another construction, this process is gradual, affecting certain usage contexts before others. This model of replacement predicts that these usage contexts play a greater role for the decrease in usage frequency of the replaced construction than other contexts. As a case study, I examine the replacement of the perfect auxiliary ser ‘be’ with haber ‘have’ in the history of Spanish using a combination of LCA and regression analysis. Starting from the eight usage contexts identified with LCA, I observe changes in the preference for ser or haber to be used in these contexts. By using the predicted probability of assignment to these contexts as a dependent variable, I provide proof of significant replacement of ser with haber, but also of haber with ser, in contexts with perfective meanings. The absence of replacement in the remaining contexts leads me to postulate that ser underwent both functional specialization and renewal as its usage frequency declined. From a theoretical perspective, this study provides empirical evidence for a key assumption in historical linguistics, namely that replacement processes occur locally.

Abstract

The present study goes beyond traditional usage-based work in that it pays close attention not only to the interaction of lexicon and syntax in language use, but also to how other analytic layers of analysis (e.g., discourse) can influence the compatibility of lexemes in particular slots of constructional schemas. To investigate this domain, we examine counteridentical constructions (e.g., if I were you, I would do it) in a dataset of more than 1,000 examples from The Corpus of Contemporary American English. We focus on significant interdependencies between the slots of the protasis (i.e., types of NPs appearing in the protasis) and apodosis (i.e., semantics of the verb lemma) and how these cross-clausal associations interact with other linguistic variables such as the time reference of the apodosis, the discourse function of the construction, and the order of the protasis and apodosis. We demonstrate a novel application of a multivariate extension of co-varying collexeme analysis via a hierarchical configural frequency analysis.

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