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- Volume 2, Issue, 2012
Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012
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Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of German verbs
Author(s): Ryan Carroll, Ragnar Svare and Joseph C. Salmonspp.: 153–172 (20)More LessNotions of constant rates of language change, whether relative or absolute, are widespread but controversial. Lieberman et al. (2007: 713) posit a frequency-based principle for verb regularization, tested against English historical data: “a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast”. We present similar data from German, a closely related language. Until the Early Modern period, regularization was relatively uncommon, while the modern period shows a dramatic upswing in strong verbs becoming weak. As Lieberman et al. and others have found, frequency plays a clear role in regularization. We show that regularization also interacts with verb class membership (type frequency), and suggest that greater regularization in and since the Early Modern period correlates with socio-historical changes in language acquisition and use. While the notion of a general half-life for verb regularization proves challenging, more nuanced quantitative research on verb regularization can advance our understanding of language change, structurally and in its socio-historical context.
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The phonology of rhythm from Classical to Modern Portuguese
Author(s): Sónia Frota, Charlotte Galves, Marina Vigário, Verónica Gonzalez-Lopez and Bernadete Abaurrepp.: 173–207 (35)More LessThe prosodic change that has been reported to have occurred from Classical to Modern Portuguese is investigated by means of a new approach to the study of rhythm in language change. Assuming that rhythm is a by-product of the presence/absence of a set of properties in a given linguistic system, we computed frequency information on rhythm-related properties from written texts of the 16th to the 19th centuries, by means of the electronic tool FreP. Results show a change in the distributions of properties related to word stress and prosodic word shape after the 16th century, indicating that the prosodic change occurred between the 16th and 17th centuries. A predictive analysis based on Bayesian statistics provided strong support for the timing of the change, and successfully modelled our data showing a timeline consistent with the direction of the prosodic shift towards the integration of stress-timing properties into Romance syllable-timed rhythm.
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Birth, Death and Resurrection of Connectives in today’s online Piedmontese
Author(s): Emanuele Miolapp.: 208–238 (31)More LessThis article deals with the diachronic development of three interclausal connectives attested in Piedmontese from 16th-century written texts to today’s wiki-Piedmontese, i.e. the variety of Piedmontese used on wikipedia. After discussing the case of the plain borrowing of però ‘but, still’ from Italian into Piedmontese, I focus on the grammaticalization path which gave rise to the counterexpectational meaning of tutun, today widespread in wiki-Piedmontese (but almost unattested in spoken Piedmontese). Second, the history of maraman is put under scrutiny: maraman develops from a plain adverbial ‘immediately’ to a hypothetical connective ‘if, in the unfortuate case that’, and eventually back to adverbial uses, but with the new meaning of ‘gradually’. Finally, I discuss the developments of tutun and maraman as cases of contact-induced grammaticalization (or aborted grammaticalization due to the contact languages) and show how non-lexical items such as connectives are used by Piedmontese ausbauizers.
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On calculating the reliability of the comparative method at long and medium distances: Afroasiatic comparative lexica as a test case
Author(s): Robert R. Ratcliffepp.: 239–281 (43)More LessThe high degree of contradiction and incompatibility between two independently produced Afroasiatic comparative lexica (Ehret 1995, Orel & Stolbova 1995) calls into question the reliability of the comparative method at deep time depths. The discrepancy could only have arisen if one or both sources contain a large number of chance or spurious matches. This article first documents the discrepancy between the two comparative lexica, and then attempts to explain it. The central proposal is that the evaluation of a proposed reconstruction must go beyond qualitative evaluations of individual proposed cognate sets and incorporate quantitative tools for evaluating the probable degree of chance matches within the reconstruction as a whole.
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Save the trees
Author(s): Guillaume Jacques and Johann-Mattis List
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