Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2022

Abstract

At least three types of sound change (prenasalization of obstruents, lenition of obstruents, conversion of labial consonants to the corresponding labiovelars) are widespread in the Austronesian language family as sporadic innovations. What marks these off as different from more familiar types of irregularity is their repeated occurrence across hundreds of related languages, a phenomenon that can conveniently be called “pandemic irregularity.” All attempts to find an explanation for why pandemic irregularities occur in terms of possibly unrecognized affixation, conditioning, borrowing, or unfinished processes, have proven futile. In particular, it is stressed that pandemic irregularity in sound change is fundamentally different from “lexical diffusion”, and deserves to be recognized in its own right as a process that works against the general application of the regularity hypothesis.

Abstract

This paper examines a distinctive syntactic feature of (pre)classical Spanish: asyndetic complementation (without complementizer que ‘that’). While many authors regard this construction as a stylistic variant which eventually declined (i.a., Girón 2005), so far no exhaustive morphosyntactic study of the phenomenon has been presented, as previous works either have focused on only one predicate (Blas Arroyo & Porcar Miralles 2016, 2018) or do not contain detailed quantitative data (Pountain 2015). Using evidence from richly annotated corpus data spanning between 1400 and 1799 (GITHE 2015), we adopt the diachronic probabilistic grammar framework (Szmrecsanyi 2013) by means of multifactorial statistical models, to identify the language-internal probabilistic constraints that regulated the que/Ø alternation, and to explore whether their relevance changed diachronically. The results indicate that asyndetic complementation is promoted in the domain of manipulation verbs (e.g., requests and commands) and, more generally, by the semantic and syntactic integration of events (Givón 2001a). Diachronically we observe that some of the effects strengthened over time, suggesting a syntactic specialization process, which might have eventually led to the restricted and marked use of the asyndeton in Modern Spanish.

Abstract

This corpus-based study examines the diachrony of differential place marking in Basque. In spatial cases, animate nouns in Basque exhibit heavier morphological forms than inanimate ones, but, under some circumstances, they can also be marked as inanimate. The data for the study comprises 66 sixteenth-to-twentieth-century texts (9,791 examples). A generalised linear mixed-effects model was fitted to analyse factors influencing the choice of marking. It is shown that animate nouns are sensitive to different aspects of the extended Animacy Hierarchy. The strongest effect is that of number (singular nouns prefer animate marking), followed by referentiality (pronouns are more prone to take animate forms than other nominals) and definiteness (definite nouns show animate marking more often than indefinite ones). The analysis also shows that animate marking became more widespread, and that there are dialectal differences. Moreover, more factors were relevant for the alternation in the earliest data (number, referentiality, definiteness, person and case) than in the most recent texts, where number is the most important.

Abstract

There is considerable literature on dative subject or non-canonical subject marking constructions in Japanese, and yet they have been studied mainly from a synchronic point of view. This paper investigates the diachronic dimension of non-canonical case marking constructions in Japanese. Following Yanagida and Whitman (2009), I assume that Old Japanese (700–800 A.D.) displays split active alignment. This paper argues that dative subjects arose as a byproduct of a change occurring from active-inactive to accusative alignment. A factor triggering this change was the reanalysis of some particular object experiencer predicates as intransitives due to the loss of the vestigial causative suffix associated with the predicate. Synchronically, these constructions involve a voice alternation of the type identified as the psych causative alternation by Alexiadou and Iordăchioaia (2014): object experiencer verbs behave parallel to causative verbs whereas alternating subject experiencer verbs behave parallel to anticausative verbs.

This article reviews Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar

This article reviews Historical Linguistics: A Cognitive Grammar Introduction