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- Volume 10, Issue 3, 2020
Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 10, Issue 3, 2020
Volume 10, Issue 3, 2020
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Productivity, richness, and diversity of light verb constructions in the history of American English
Author(s): John D. Sundquistpp.: 349–388 (40)More LessAbstractThis study provides an empirical analysis of productivity in Light Verb Constructions (LVCs) in the history of American English. LVCs contain a semantically light verb like make or take that may be paired with an abstract nominal object, as in make an assumption or take charge. Using a 406-million word corpus of texts written between 1810 and 2009, we track the frequency of LVCs and analyze the range of light verb + nominal object pairings. Using statistical measurements of biodiversity from the field of ecology, we evaluate the hypothesis that “the rich get richer” among light verbs: the most frequent verbs become more frequent and more diverse, occurring with an ever-growing variety of different NP complements. The results contribute to ongoing discussions in cross-linguistic, diachronic research on reasons for the growth of LVCs, the gradient nature of linguistic productivity, and the role of exemplars in the interaction between type and token frequencies during periods of linguistic change.
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Clitic position in Old Occitan affirmative verb-first declaratives coordinated by e
Author(s): Bryan Donaldsonpp.: 389–426 (38)More LessAbstractThis paper offers a variationist analysis of object and adverbial clitic position in coordinated affirmative verb-first main declaratives introduced by e(t) “and” in Old Occitan. In this context, clitics occur in either preverbal (e·l vestit “and clothed him”) or postverbal position (e perdonet li “and pardoned him”). Following recent work on Medieval Romance coordination, I posit that proclitic and enclitic examples reflect different coordination structures at the underlying syntactic level. Data from complete analyses of five major 13th- and 14th-century texts, analyzed in a variationist approach using logistic regression, reveal that the choice between coordination structures – and hence, between proclisis and enclisis – is principled rather than random and depends on the degree of continuity or rupture/discontinuity between the conjuncts.
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The empirical reality of bridging contexts
Author(s): Pierre Larrivée and Amel Kallelpp.: 427–451 (25)More LessAbstractThe purpose of this paper is to provide quantitative substantiation for the role of bridging context in grammatical change. Bridging contexts are assumed to be environments compatible with the new function that an item is acquiring. The evolving item would therefore be predicted to occur in bridging contexts at significant rates just before the change. To test this prediction, the well-known evolution of Negative Polarity Items into an n-word is analysed, using the well-documented case of the aucun in the history of French. Charting its course in a monogeneric corpus of narrative legal material, we find that the item occurs in strong negative polarity environments at rates of over 50% before it is found in a majority of n-word uses. This supports the view that bridging contexts are instrumental to change, and that they involve quantitative conditions.
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Stress in real time
Author(s): Klaus Hofmannpp.: 452–486 (35)More LessAbstractThis contribution reviews a series of studies by Kelly (and Bock), suggesting that stress preferences of English nouns and verbs for left-hand and right-hand stress patterns are partly a result of alternating rhythm in real utterances. This claim is tested on diachronic corpus data to verify its historical implications. By using verse evidence to calibrate stress values for historical word classes, the quantitative analysis confirms that distributional asymmetries regarding strong and weak syllables in the contexts of nouns and verbs have existed at least since Late Middle English. In addition, the claim that stem-final segments predict the likelihood of right-hand stress is not only confirmed but the effect is found to be independent of etymological origin.
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Save the trees
Author(s): Guillaume Jacques and Johann-Mattis List
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