Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013

This article is concerned with null referential subjects in Old Swedish (ca. 1225–1526), and addresses the problem of why the scope for such subjects has been reduced during the history of Swedish. Within diachronic syntax it has been a common assumption that syntactic change is caused by changes in morphology. However, this study shows that deflexion only to a limited extent can explain the loss of null referential subjects in Old Swedish, since the most striking change in their use seems to take place during Early Old Swedish (ca. 1225–1375) before the loss of person agreement: whereas referential subjects could be omitted from verb-second main clauses and subordinate clauses in Early Old Swedish, in Late Old Swedish corresponding subjectless clauses are uncommon. Within the framework of generative grammar it is argued that this is an effect of changes in movement strategies to the subject position, [Spec, IP]: whereas movement to the subject position is syntactically determined in Modern Swedish, in Early Old Swedish the corresponding move is pragmatically determined. The study is based on a corpus of approximately 193,400 words, collected from 12 Old Swedish texts.

This article challenges the widely held view that a series of pervasive diachronic innovations in Cappadocian Greek owe their development to language contact with Turkish. Placing particular emphasis on its genealogical relationships with the other dialects of Asia Minor, the claim is that language change in Cappadocian is best understood when considered within a larger dialectological context. Examining the limited use of the definite article as a case in point and in comparison with parallel developments attested in Pontic and Silliot Greek, it is shown in detail that the surface similarity of the outcomes of Cappadocian innovations to their Turkish structural equivalents represents the final stages in long series of language-internal developments whose origins predate the intensification of Cappadocian–Turkish contact. The article thus offers an alternative to contact-oriented approaches and calls for a revision of accepted views on the language-internal and -external dynamics that shaped Cappadocian into its modern form.

The supine starts to occur in Early Modern Romanian (EMR) by the late 16th century, during the general process of replacement of infinitives in subordinated clauses. The supine replaces the infinitive in non-finite relative clauses. In this article, I argue that EMR, but not other languages (e.g., Balkan Slavic) provided ambiguity in the primary linguistic data in the context of infinitival de-relatives, because of the underspecification of de for grammatical category (i.e., either preposition or relativizing complementizer). The ambiguity led to two parallel derivations — a PP-de and a CP-de — each of them being an alternative to the infinitive relative. The latter configuration preserves the relativizing status of de, while the former reanalyzes de as a preposition.

The semantics of existential there is discussed in a diachronic, corpus-based perspective. While previous studies of there have been qualitative or relied on interpreting relative frequencies directly, the present study combines multivariate statistical techniques with linguistic theory through distributional semantics. It is argued that existential uses of there in earlier stages of English were not semantically empty, and that the original meaning was primarily deictic rather than locative. This analysis combines key insights from previous studies of existential there with a Construction Grammar perspective, and discusses some methodological concerns regarding statistical methods for creating computational semantic maps from diachronic corpus data.