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- Volume 12, Issue 1, 2022
Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2022
Volume 12, Issue 1, 2022
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Pathways of initial consonant loss
Author(s): Jean-Christophe Verstraetepp.: 1–30 (30)More LessAbstractThis paper investigates the historical loss of root-initial consonants, using a case study of Middle Paman languages of Cape York Peninsula, in northeastern Australia. Systematic loss of initial consonants is a typologically unusual phenomenon, mainly found in Australia, that has often been regarded as a starting point for far-reaching changes in root structure, phonotactics and even phoneme inventory. So far, the literature has focused mainly on identifying phonetic causes of initial loss. This study focuses on the actual processes and pathways of initial loss, which is an equally important part of the historical puzzle. Specifically, it shows that there are multiple pathways for initial loss: it can be the result of a gradual phonetic process involving intermediate steps like lenition, as is assumed in part of the literature, but it can also be due to more abrupt processes involving borrowing and even morphosyntactic alternations. This adds to a more diversified model of how initial loss actually proceeds, which together with earlier work on the diversity of phonetic causes of initial loss produces a more comprehensive understanding of this typologically and diachronically unusual phenomenon.
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Old English intensifiers
Author(s): James M. Strattonpp.: 31–69 (39)More LessAbstractWhile many studies have employed variationist methods to examine longitudinal changes in the English intensifier system, to date, no variationist studies have tackled the intensifier system of Old English. By providing a critical view of this system at an earlier stage in the history of the English language, the present study adds to the long tradition of scholarship on intensifiers while providing new insight into their diachronic development. Despite its antiquity, several parallels can be drawn with the intensifier system at later stages in the language. Both internal and external factors are found to constrain this system, with predicative adjectives favoring intensification over attributive adjectives, prose texts having higher intensification rates than verse texts, Latin-based texts having higher intensification rates than vernacular texts, and the rate of intensification increasing over time. The quantitative analysis of the Old English system also increases the time depth necessary for a more detailed reflection on the diachronic recycling, replacement, and renewal of intensifiers. Language contact and borrowing are also postulated as driving forces of innovation and replacement in earlier stages of the English language.
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Indexicality, semanticity and contact along the now < this time pathway
Author(s): Thomas Leddy-Cecerepp.: 70–107 (38)More LessAbstractThis study presents data from modern Arabic innovations now < this time to investigate the cross-linguistic developmental pathway temporal deictic < [demonstrative [time noun]]. Products of this path (e.g., German heute, Spanish ahora) feature consistently in contrastive approaches to grammaticalization and lexicalization and have been advanced as exclusive examples of both phenomena, without clear resolution. In this investigation, I establish the derivation of now forms in dialectal Arabic from ten distinct [demonstrative [time noun]] source constructions and identify patterns of fusion and coalescence relevant to both grammaticalization and lexicalization analyses. I then demonstrate a correlated progression of indexicalization and desemanticization in these items’ semanto-pragmatic structure that firmly positions them as examples of grammaticalizing, rather than lexicalizing, change, and proceed to develop this account via examination of the cross-dialectal diffusion of now < this time as an abstract, schematized structure. This approach provides additional support for a grammaticalization account of temporal deictic < [demonstrative [time noun]] developments cross-linguistically and elaborates a novel evidentiary stream with implications for the integration of contact linguistics and grammaticalization/lexicalization studies more broadly.
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Reichenbach meets underspecification
Author(s): Guido Seiler and Thilo Weberpp.: 108–166 (59)More LessAbstractThis paper investigates the long-term diachronic development of the perfect and preterite tenses in German and provides a novel analysis by supplementing Reichenbach’s (1947) classical theory of tense by the notion of underspecification. Based on a newly compiled parallel corpus spanning the entire documented history of German, we show that the development in question is cyclic: It starts out with only one tense form (preterite) compatible with both current relevance and narrative past readings in (early) Old High German and, via three intermediate stages, arrives at only one tense form again (perfect) compatible with the same readings in modern Upper German dialects. We propose that in order to capture all attested stages we must allow tenses to be unspecified for R (reference time), with R merely being inferred pragmatically. We then propose that the transitions between the different stages can be explained by the interplay between semantics and pragmatics.
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Save the trees
Author(s): Guillaume Jacques and Johann-Mattis List
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